


One with the Dark: The Fourth Wild Power

by Torrance_Grey



Category: Night World - L. J. Smith
Genre: Adult Content, Adult Language, M/M, adult beverage use, some violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-24
Updated: 2016-09-24
Packaged: 2018-08-16 17:58:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 26,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8111935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Torrance_Grey/pseuds/Torrance_Grey
Summary: Daybreak has identified the Fourth, and he's the last person anyone would expect. Even worse, prophecy says he'll die before age 21 -- less than three months from now.





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

> Any Night World aficionados still out there? This is a gift to an old favorite fandom. 
> 
> Canon through "Witchlight," then deviates. Not a "Strange Fate" fic.

  
"Noel Phoenix? You've got to be kidding me."

Since the witches had seceded from the Night World, Circle Daybreak had been blessed — that wasn’t how all of them would have characterized it — with the companionship of Blaise Harman. She hung around a lot because her cousin Thea was a charter member of Daybreak. Now that the witches weren’t part of the Night World anymore, Thea was back in the good graces of all the witch elders, and she and Blaise didn’t have to sneak around to see each other anymore.

Thea argued to her friends in Daybreak’s inner circle that while Blaise would never officially sign on to their save-the-world agenda — she was too cool for that — her insights were valuable. Blaise was sharing some of those insights now, at a war council Circle Daybreak was having at Thierry’s safe house in Oregon.

“Look, I knew Noel Phoenix, and there’s just no way he’s the fourth Wild Power. He didn’t have any kind of power. He was completely average,” Blaise said firmly. “Average-looking, too. Curly brown hair, brown eyes, a little heavy --”

“He wasn’t heavy,” Thea corrected.

“Looks are hardly the important thing here,” Delos interrupted.

At this, and seeing the irritated looks that some Daybreakers were exchanging, Blaise yielded to Thea. “Fine. You tell them about him,” she said to her cousin.

Thea nodded slowly. “Blaise is right. Noel was ... gentle.”

“Oh, come on —” Blaise interrupted.

“Let her speak,” Thierry remonstrated.

“I will, but it’s not going to help anyone if she’s too nice to tell it like it is.” Blaise looked newly serious. “There’s a lot riding on this ... at least, to hear you guys tell it.”

There were nods around the room.

“She’s right,” Thierry said. “So. Tell it like it is, Thea.”

All eyes turned to the slender blond girl by Blaise’s side. Thea looked ill at ease with all the scrutiny, but she began to speak.

“The name is a ... an inside joke, I guess. Phoenix, the firebird. The powers of the Phoenix line are pyrokinesis and levitation. By pyrokinesis, I mean not just witch fire, I mean regular fire. Alis Phoenix, his mother, could set things on fire with her mind.

“She died at 21. Nobody likes to talk about it, but there were rumors. Trained too fast, pushed too hard. She was burned out. One day, after a hard session, Alis said she felt a chill.” Thea sipped from a cup of tea. “She got weak. Her temperature was subnormal. It just kept dropping and dropping. The healers couldn’t do anything. She died in twelve hours.”

“Oh, God,” someone whispered. It was Maggie Neely, and she was reaching for Delos’ hand, no doubt thinking of how his father had thought of him as a weapon and pushed him beyond his capacity.

“Fortunately -- I mean, in the eyes of the Night World, Alis had an heir,” Thea went on. “A son, Noel. But Noel’s father, Darius, didn’t want anything else to do with the Night World. He took his son and fled. He covered his trail well, I guess. It was a while before anyone found out where they were. Well, where Noel was.

“Darius had died, and Noel went into a foster home in the Midwest. He was being raised as a human. After a while a friend of his father’s found him. Lord Morgan.”

Someone whistled, impressed.

“Right. He brought Noel back into the Night World. Raised him as a foster son. But Noel, as Blaise says, didn’t really seem to exhibit the Phoenix powers. Or any powers, really. Noel was in Midnight and I was Twilight, so I didn’t know him too well. But he was gentle, and in Midnight, calling someone ‘gentle’ is not a compliment.”

Blaise raised an eyebrow, looking unapologetic.

“One incident all the witches heard about was this: Noel got invited to a party in New York City, that’s where Morgan lives. Some highborn witches and lamia were there. It was late, and things got a little wild ... some of the boys had an idea. They were on the top of an 18-story building. Some of them grabbed Noel, I guess they had him by arms and legs, and they were threatening to throw him off the roof.”

“Just threatening, right?” Hannah asked, shocked.

“Well,” Thea said slowly, “the thing was, they said everyone thought there had been a mistake, that Noel was really a human who’d just been mistaken for the Phoenix heir. So it was a test: if Noel was really the Phoenix son, he’d use his powers and levitate. And if not, if he fell to his death, then he was human after all.”

“And killing a human isn’t against the law,” Delos finished grimly.

“Right. It was like those old witch trials by water they had in Europe,” Thea explained.

Even Blaise didn’t look nonchalant by this time.

“He was sixteen then,” Thea went on. “A few weeks later he was gone. Just ran away.”

“And now?” Maggie asked.

“And now Aradia says he’s the Fourth Wild Power,” Thierry said, reiterating what had been said at the opening of the meeting. Aradia wasn’t with them, she was sleeping, exhausted from hours of ritual and divination.

“But wait,” Hannah said. “Isn’t the fourth power from Twilight? And didn’t you say he was in Midnight?”

“He was in Midnight,” Blaise confirmed. “I remember his dull quiet ass from all those circles where he never did anything interesting.”

Thierry intervened. “But his parents, Alis and Darius, were in Twilight. Noel was born into that circle. He later affiliated with Midnight because that was Morgan’s crowd,” he explained. “That’s what Aradia said.” Thierry nodded, thinking. “There’s another prophecy about Noel that bothers me more. I didn’t know it. It was predicted that Noel would die before his 21st birthday. Before he attained his mother’s age, that was the prophecy.”

“I never heard that,” Thea said, sharply.

“Aradia knew it. It’s not the sort of cheery thing the elders would be likely to spread around. But it means — well, I’m not sure what it means, but it doesn’t sound good.”

“Can’t we head off prophecy? Do they have to come true?” Jez asked.

“Maybe he’s not the Wild Power,” Maggie suggested. “How old is he now?” All the Wild Powers had been born in the same year, and they were all 20.

“He’s 20,” Thierry said. “He’s the oldest of you. He’ll be 21 in three months.”

“Maybe it just means he dies in the final battle, and that’s coming sooner than we think,” Delos said. He didn’t have to add the line from the prophecy: _In blood, the final price is paid._

“We gotta go get him, then, the sooner the better,” Keller said. “I’ll call Nissa and Winnie.”

“No,” Thierry said. “The main problem we’re going to have is gaining Noel’s trust.”

“Why?” Keller asked.

“Because,” Thierry pointed out, “the Night World accidentally killed his mother when he was a kid, and then later a bunch of witches tried to throw him off an 18-story building, that’s why.” He looked around the circle. “Different tactics are needed here. We’ve got no reason to believe the other side suspects who the Fourth is — as Blaise demonstrated, the name of Noel Phoenix doesn’t exactly impress anyone who knew him. But we have every reason to believe Noel’s going to say, ‘Fuck off’ when we find him. We’re not going to earn any points by having a strike team surround him and try to throw him in the back of a car.” He looked pointedly at Keller, who shrugged. Force was her specialty. Talk wasn’t.

“So how will we approach him?” Thea asked.

“Not how. Who.”

Everyone turned to look at the doorway, where Aradia stood tall but barefoot in a cinnamon silk robe. She was ‘looking’ at Thea in the unique way the blind maiden had. “I suspect Noel likes you better than anyone else he knows in the Night World. I think you’re elected.”

“I still think you’ll need backup. Just in case,” Keller said.

“I wouldn’t object to that,” Thea said. “But Thierry, I thought I heard you say ‘when we find him.’ Do we know where he is?”

“I’m still working on that,” Aradia said. “He must have done some spells to obscure his location, or wards ...”

“Spells? Wards?” Blaise interjected, wryly. “Sounds like no-talent Noel is a little better than we all thought.”

____

  
Twelve hours later, on the opposite coast, the object of all Daybreak’s speculation slept in a cheap little cabin in Sunrise Key, Florida.

Blaise might have been surprised at the changes in Noel Phoenix in the several years since she’d known him. He was still of medium height, but a hard physical job on in the boatyard had worked 15 pounds off his body and raised muscle in his arms, his shoulders, and on his calves. There were light sun and saltwater highlights in his chestnut hair, making it more tawny than mahogany, and he’d let that hair grow until its curls brushed below his shoulders. At work he always pulled it back into a ponytail.

At first, the humans he’d worked with had made fun of his long hair, his tiger’s eyes on a leather cord, and the way he politely refused food that had meat in it ... but Noel was a hard worker, and he’d earned their respect. The callused, ball-cap-wearing men around Noel figured him for a college dropout finding his way; he’d leave soon enough, they told themselves.

Noel had gone to work at six that morning and worked through until two; after, he’d needed a nap. He hadn’t slept well the night before. The wind chimes outside his small bungalow had jangled regularly although there’d been no wind, and Noel knew they were reacting to someone trying to find him, probing the magical defenses he’d set up around his home. In order to sleep that afternoon, Noel had finally decided to take the damn chimes down. If someone was seeking him after four years, well, he’d deal with that when he woke up.

Noel had slept soundly for three hours and woken feeling peaceful. Ready, at least. He was glad he’d slept well, because he felt that whatever was going to happen was going to start happening very soon.

He was not surprised when the phone rang.


	2. Chapter 2

“Unity, Noel,” the voice on the line said.  “This is Thea Harman.”

“Thea,” Noel said.  He was surprised.  Probably in his heart he’d been expecting Morgan.  Or someone male, at least.  He wanted, stupidly, to put on more clothing than he was wearing.  

“How are you?”

“I’m all right,” he said.  “What’s —” he tried to think of a polite way to phrase his question.  He liked Thea.  She was nothing like her bitch cousin, Blaise.  “What’s on your mind?”

“This will take a minute or two to explain,” Thea’s soft voice warned him.

Noel listened for nearly a quarter hour.  He’d been completely out of touch with the Night World and there was a lot of absorb: the rise of Daybreak, the rediscovered prophecies, the race to find the Wild Powers, the death of the Crone, and the secession of the witches -- “all but the darkest and most power-hungry members of Midnight,” Thea said.

Noel listened and although it was an extraordinary story, he believed all of it.  Up to a point.

“It’s you, Noel,” Thea said. “You are the last Wild Power.”

“What?” Noel said.  “I don’t think that’s a very funny joke.”

“We’re sure of it,” Thea said.  

“Aradia made a mistake,” Noel said.  “It’s not me.  I would know if I had a power like that.”

“That’s what Iliana said,” Thea told him.  “Iliana thought she was human.  She didn’t even believe in witches when Keller and her team — Raksha Keller, you’ll meet her soon — found her in North Carolina.”

Noel was silent.

“It’d be better if we could talk about it in person.  Can we come see you?”

“Exactly how many people are going to descend on me if I say yes?”

“Just me, and probably Keller.  The other Wild Powers want to come, but they’re not allowed to go out adventuring as much as they’d like, because they’re too important,” Thea said.  “Listen, I hate to rush you, but if we’ve figured out who you are, the Night World could too.  They’ll send people.  Assassins.  We need to come now.”  

Noel looked toward the ocean and felt his peaceful life in Sunrise Key coming to an end.  It was reaching for him again, the Night World that had killed his mother and given him nothing but misery. But according to Thea, it wasn’t the Night World she was affiliated with anymore.  She was with Daybreak, and the Night World was their enemy.  That was a pleasing development.  Before, he couldn’t be a witch and not be part of the Night World that he hated.  Now, he could.

“Noel?” Thea said. 

“Let me give you directions to where I am.”

  
______

At the safe house in Oregon, Thea hung up the phone. She exhaled, relieved. “Good job,” Thierry said.  

Ultimately, Daybreak had given up on scrying and taken a more high-tech route to finding Noel.  After confirming there were no listings for Noel Phoenix on traditional land lines, they’d hacked into the customer lists for cellular providers and found the number.

Keller, Thierry, and Aradia had all sat by to listen in on Thea’s first conversation with the Fourth.  She’d known she had to strike just the right tone and she thought she’d done a pretty good job.  She’d explained the situation and made it sound serious, but not too scary.  She’d found a way to slip into the conversation the fact that the Powers were being protected.  That might appeal to Noel, she thought, who seemed a bit more timid than, say, Jez.  

Most important, she’d told him about the other Wild Powers: streetwise Jez, laconic Delos, and Iliana, who everyone loved.  These, Thea implied, were his brother and sisters.  Noel had always been an outsider, not good enough for the witches around him.  Now, he was being offered membership in the tightest inner circle in all the world.  It had to appeal to him, Daybreak had thought.  

Keller got to her feet.  “They’re fueling Thierry’s jet now.  I’m packed already.”

“Me, too,” Thea said.

“And so are Nissa and Winnie.  We’re a team, Thierry,” Keller said, at his concerned look.  “They’re not six feet tall, they’re not thugs.  They won’t spook him.  We all went after Iliana together and that came out all right.”

Thierry sighed, then nodded. “All right.  They can go.”

  
______

After talking to Thea, Noel dressed, walked out to his porch, sat on the railing, and rolled a joint.  

He’d fixed up the little house himself, painting it in a pale sea color and carving figures into the wood lintel over the door, arcane witch symbols no passing human would recognize. Noel had wanted to flee further than the Florida Keys,  but when he’d left New York he’d had almost no money, and the work he’d found since had just been enough for his rented house, including the break on the rent he got for fixing it up.  Noel wasn’t broke, but he had to live simply.  In that respect, he was a true witch.  Lamia tended to flaunt their wealth, living in big houses, riding in expensive cars, crisscrossing the globe.  Witches needed to blend in.  They might have big houses, but they were big ramshackle houses, and instead of elegant landscaping tended by paid workers, they had rambling herb-filled gardens they kept themselves. 

Noel, too, had an herb garden. He’d left the Night World but he still followed witch ways almost unconsciously.  He didn’t know any other way to live.  

 _Herbs are a witch’s friend,_ he thought, smiling, as he inhaled marijuana smoke and held it in his lungs.  Marijuana, of course, was a human habit.  Noel had adopted human ways, some of them, too.

Or returned to them.

Noel’s earliest memories were of living among humans, a foster home in Indiana.  His name, back then, had been Joel, Joey for short.  After Darius’ premature death in a car wreck, Noel was taken to the hospital and the sheriff there misunderstood his name.  “Joel” went down on the sheriff’s notepad. 

His foster parents raised rabbits in a pen.  They were let out on the lawn for exercise and when it was time for them to go back in their hutches Joey and the other kids were sent out to chase them down.  The rabbits were speedy but not smart, and by working in teams the kids could trick them, corner them, round them up.  Joey was very gentle when he picked them up; he got angry to see his oldest foster brother, Billy, pick them up by their ears.

When Joey was ten, Morgan found him.

He was a tall man, with dark hair and eyes.  He was a stranger all right, but he wasn’t wearing a long dark coat or driving a van.  He wore faded jeans, like Joey’s foster father usually did, and a silvery sweater and leaned up against an aging Saab.  Joey was playing soccer with some other kids after school and the man was watching.  When the kids took a break for water, the man beckoned to Joey, very casually.

 _I was a very good friend of your father’s,_ the man said.  _I’d like to tell you about him.  Would you like to hear it?_

Yes, Joey said.

 _Okay, but you have to get in the car.  You’ve been told not to do that, but this time it’s okay._  

I don’t think I should.

_You’re different from these people.  I know you realize that, inside.  It’s a mistake you’re here.  You belong with a different group of people.  Amazing people, like you and me and your father and mother._

I have to ask for permission first.

_No, you don’t.  You never have to ask those kind of people for permission for anything.  Ever again.  I’ll prove it to you.  I bet you remember your real name, don’t you? Don’t say it out loud, just tell me if you do._

Yes.

_Do any of those people know your real name?_

No.

The man sat on his heels.  _Your real name is Noel._

And Noel believed.

He never saw the expression of horror that crossed the face of the teacher’s aide, just coming out of the classroom building, as Noel climbed into the old foreign car and rode away.  It wasn’t until years later that he realized what guilt and worry he’d caused those humans who’d taken responsibility for him.

But they’d long forgotten him, Noel told himself.  Long ago he’d stopped being even a face on a milk carton.  

In New York City, Morgan dressed a lot differently.  Elegantly, appropriately to his high position in Circle Midnight.  He was an exception among witches.  No rundown house or herb garden for Lord Morgan, an elder of Midnight.   When he took his place in circles, he dressed all in black, expensive black, with a gleaming lodestone amulet around his neck.

At age 10, Noel began to practice with the kids of Circle Midnight.  At first, they respected him. They wanted to know him and be his friend.  They’d heard from their parents that he was the Phoenix heir and the adopted son of Lord Morgan.  But slowly, they began to see him differently.

Noel was nice to all of them. In the world he’d come from, nice was a big thing.  It made friends. Here it was different.  The children of Midnight would have respected him more if he were unkind, nasty to those he didn’t like. They thought he was weak. Furthermore, Noel got scared when he first saw a lamia hiss with sharpened teeth and silver eyes. Noel excelled at his human schoolwork, but exhibited no witch powers.  He made the mistake of cultivating human friendships. 

In his teenage years, Noel kept struggling to fit in.  He cut his human friends out of his life.  He applied himself to studies of magic.  He got a Black Dahlia tattooed on his shoulder. But it was too late.  The witches of Midnight taunted him, dared him to set things on fire, to levitate.  They pressed him to prove himself, and he couldn’t.  One day he found a picture of himself hanging in his locker at school.  It depicted him as the children’s-book hero Harry Potter, with the lightning-bolt scar on his face.  The caption read: Harry Powerless.

A rumor sprang up that Noel was human, that Morgan had made an error in rescuing him from Indiana.  Morgan himself became irate at that.    
“You are not a party entertainer!” Morgan snapped.  “They have no right to demand that you perform to amuse them.”  He took Noel’s chin and tilted his face upward.  “I see your father clearly in your features. One day you’ll show them all.”

But his friends couldn’t wait.  Noel still shuddered when he remembered swinging like a hammock at the hands of four or five young men of Midnight.  They would have thrown him over, if Morgan hadn’t appeared unexpectedly to stop it.  They would have killed him.

Later, alone before Morgan, Noel had  broken down and wept from nerves and anger, and he had seen something in Morgan’s face he’d always feared was coming: disappointment.  

A week later, he’d been rummaging among the back shelves of a witch store, sitting on his heels, obscured from the view of two gossiping witches when the conversation turned to the party and to that Phoenix boy nearly being thrown from a roof.

“They nearly killed him,” the first woman said.

“Five years early,” the second one said, nodding knowingly.

“What do you mean?”

“You haven’t heard the prophecy about the Phoenix heir?” And then she’d filled her friend in, as the Phoenix heir himself listened, still and silent, ten feet away.

Dead before 21.  He’d get even less time than his mother had.  Morgan hadn’t even told him.  

In a way, hearing about the prophecy had changed things, particularly the way Noel viewed his inability to manifest the Phoenix powers and the rumor that he wasn’t really the Phoenix heir.  Now, those two things gave him hope.  If he wasn’t the real Noel Phoenix, then the prophecy didn’t apply to him.  He would not die.  He would live.

Two weeks later, Noel packed his things and put the Night World behind him.  

In Florida, Noel lived as a human and waited.  If his 21st birthday came, and he survived ... then he’d really be done with the Night World.  Then what?  Maybe college.  Maybe Europe, or South America, when he had the money.  

But now things had changed, Noel thought, taking a hit from the joint.  If Daybreak was right, if he were the last Wild Power, then he was a witch.  So he’d have to be Noel.  So he would die soon. If he died in the next three months, though, was it possible he could be the Fourth Wild Power?  How could he stave off the end of the world if he was ashes on the wind?

In another person, this paradox would simply have been a brain teaser that would bring on a headache.  To Noel, it was a matter of life and death, and it was making him sick to his stomach, queasy with anxiety, despite the soothing sound of the ocean and the mellow smoke of his joint.  
 

Noel’s phone was ringing again.  He rolled off the porch railing and went in.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Noel.”

The voice on the other end didn’t introduce itself.  It didn’t have to.  

“Hello, sir.”  Noel had never called Morgan father, nor could he call him by name.  And he didn’t ask how Morgan had gotten the phone number.  Morgan was a witch, and Thea had said the witches were working with Daybreak.  Morgan must have had access to what information they had. 

“Has Daybreak called you?” There were no pleasantries exchanged, no catching up.  Morgan’s voice was serious.

“They just called, just now.”

“I see.  And they told you they want you to join them.  That you are the Fourth.”

“Yes.”  Noel went to stand in the doorway.  The late afternoon sky and the water were calming to look at.

“Are you going to them?”

“They’re coming here.”

“Where is here?”  
“A place called Sunrise Key, at the tip of Florida,” Noel swallowed.  “You approve of me talking to them, I assume?  I was told the witches seceded.” He winced as he said it.  Morgan had been back in his life for one minute, via telephone, and already Noel was seeking his approval, like a kid.  

“You heard correctly,” Morgan said.

“But you don’t believe I could be the Wild Power?”  

Morgan paused, then spoke calmly.  “I think it’s possible that you are the Fourth.  I don’t disbelieve it.  I have concerns about you meeting with Daybreak, though.  I’m worried about your well-being.”

“My well-being?  That concerns you, weighed against the fate of the world?  The welfare of one person, who is —” Noel stopped.  

“Who is what?” Morgan asked. 

“Who is tentatively scheduled to be dead in three months anyhow.”  He’d never spoken about the prophecy to Morgan, or vice-versa.

“Who told you that?”  

“What I wonder is, why didn’t I hear it from you?”  Noel countered.

Morgan cleared his throat. Had his foster father ever been flustered before?  Noel tried to think of an occasion and couldn’t.  “Oh, Noel,” Morgan said softly.  “I thought about it all the time.  It was such a terrible thing for you to have to know.  When was it right to tell you?  Why should you know at 15 and not 14, at 16 instead of 15?”

“So when?  My 20th birthday?”  

“The issue became academic,” Morgan said.  “You were gone .. and I tried to let you have your privacy.  I didn’t seek you out.  I thought that maybe, if you left, you could circumvent the prophecy somehow.”

Noel sat down in the doorway.  He felt weak in his legs.  “I thought you were disappointed in me.”

“Disappointed?  I was never disappointed with you.  You always conducted yourself with honor.  That was the most I could ask.”

Noel ran his hands through his thick curls.  

“I need to see you, Noel.  Before you meet with Daybreak.”

“Why?  Surely they’re trustworthy.”

“They want the best for the world at large.  But not necessarily for you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Did Thea tell you the actual words of the prophecy? ‘One with the Twilight, to be one with the dark.’  That’s you, Noel.”

“So?”  But he did feel a twinge of foreboding.

“Doesn’t sound very pleasant, does it? One with the dark.  What if the other prophecy, the one about you, isn’t about a literal death?  What if it’s some kind of spiritual death, soul death?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I.  But I want to find out, and I don’t think you should join up with them until you understand what it means.”

“Thea wouldn’t do anything to hurt me.”

“Thea is in Circle Daybreak.  Daybreakers are zealots.  They will do anything to win their war against the Night World.  I’m sure Thea believes she’s saving the world — but from everything I’ve heard, Daybreak wants to save the world from being ruled by Night People.  That’s not the same thing as keeping the world from total destruction.”

“She said —”

“That the lamia and the vampires and the shapeshifters will kill millions of humans and enslave the rest?  Hunt humans down Wall Street in broad daylight and hold a bloodfeast at the Rainbow Room?  I’ve heard that too.  It’s political propaganda.  It happens in every war, and this is a war.” 

The vehemence in his voice made Noel feel uneasy.  The wind chimes, the ones he’d taken down, still lay on a heap on the front stoop.  Noel got to his feet, picked them up, and hung them back on their hook.  They stirred as he did so, making a faint musical noise.

“Are you still there?”

“I’m here,” Noel said.  “Listen, I’m just going to talk to Thea.  There’s no harm in that.”

“You’re being naive!”  Morgan was angry now.  “Daybreak will take you by force if they feel it’s necessary.  They’ve done it before.  Do not agree to meet them.”

The chimes, rather than settling down, were jangling louder. There was no wind.

Not all the witches had seceded, Thea had said. The darkest and most power-hungry didn’t.  

Morgan had raised Noel, and Noel was grateful, but he had always known that Morgan craved power, and he had an affinity for dark magic.

“Sir,” he said, “when the witches seceded from the Night World, did you go with them?”

There was a beat of silence, just a second too long, before Morgan spoke.  “Of course I did.”  

The chimes were going crazy now. _Oh, Goddess._

“Noel, just stay where you are and I’ll have someone come get you.”

_They’ll send people. Assassins._

“Noel?”

Noel broke the connection.  

He wasn’t at all sure he was the Fourth Wild Power, but he did believe that Daybreak thought he was. If the Night World believed it too, they would have no trouble killing him. They might do it him just in case.  Many of them liked killing.

He ran his hands through his hair and thought.  The wards would protect him —

You told him you were in Sunrise Key, remember?

Sunrise Key was tiny.  They could find him here, and there was only one road off the island, back to the mainland.   If he didn’t get off now, he was trapped.

Noel plunged through his doorway, back into the house.  With little thought, he threw a change of clothes in a shoulder bag, all the money he had, everything remotely magical.  He found a leather necklace with moonstones on it for protection and pulled it over his head.

Outside, he hastily did a ritual to put up wards around his old VW van.  Protections were always more flimsy on a vehicle than a structure.  They worked better if you kept moving; the energy was harder to trace that way.   And if you got out of the vehicle and were on foot, you had virtually no protection whatsoever.

Last of all, he left a note on the door. Noel didn’t know who’d show up first, Thea or the Night World, so he didn’t reveal his traveling plans. He wrote,         

> _Morgan knows. I’m on the road. Will be in contact when I can._  

In minutes, the VW van was charging up the road, toward the mainland.  

_______  
  
Three thousand miles away, Thierry’s jet was lifting off.

“You look worried,” Winnie said, squeezing Thea’s hand.  “Don’t worry, we’re the best.  We won’t let anything happen to you, any more than we’ll let anything happen to Noel Phoenix.”

“I know,” Thea said, trying to look serene.  She didn’t mean to cast doubt on the talents of Daybreak’s best strike team.  She told herself that her feeling of foreboding was unfounded.  Just nerves.

“In hours,” Winnie checked her thin silver watch, “in eight hours, tops, we’ll be on our way back.  With the Fourth.”

“I know,” Thea said. “I’m glad.”


	3. Chapter 3

Noel arrived in Miami at sunset.  He cruised down South Beach in his VW van, checking out the mansions that lined the street.  It seemed strange to him to see the large houses of the rich right in an urban area:  in New York, the wealthy lived atop high-rise buildings.  If they wanted big houses, they moved upstate, or out of state.

These houses had gardens, too, behind their scrolled gates and fences. Noel, curious, craned to look at one.  Not a very useful garden, he thought, from a witch or a human standpoint.  No herbs, not even any fruit or vegetables. Just flowers, tropical and night-blooming flowers. A pleasure garden.  And in the middle, a statue.  A tall naked man, well-built with ...  with an enormous marble erection.

As soon as he saw it, Noel snapped his eyes away.  Just in time, too.  He hadn’t seen the brake lights on the BMW ahead of him.  His van’s tires shrieked as he came to a stop just in time.  Noel’s face burned.  

_Well, what did you expect?  This is South Beach._

He drove very cautiously the road the rest of the way into the business district, where clubs and restaurants lined the roads.  Noel drove his van into a public lot and parked.  There was a pay phone at its edge.  Noel eyed it.  He needed to contact Daybreak, but he didn’t trust his cell phone.  Cell phone transmissions could be intercepted.   

When he was standing at the pay phone, Noel dialed directory assistance.  Thea had given him no phone number.  Probably she’d thought it wouldn’t be necessary, since Daybreak was on their way to Florida.

When the operator answered, Noel said, “Thierry Descouedres, please.”

A pause.  “I have no listing, sir.”

Of course, Thierry would be unlisted.  

Next, Noel asked for a listing for the Harman store. There was none.  Thea had mentioned that her grandmother was dead; it seemed the business that was the Crone’s cover had not gone on without her.

“Do you have any other listings under Harman?”

There was a clittering noise, a keyboard.  “One. Ralph and Laura.  Would you like that one?”

“No,” he said dully. “Thanks.”

Walking back to the van, Noel rubbed his bare arms against the breeze that had picked up.  He stood at the driver’s-side door to his van, but didn’t get in; he didn’t know where he would head once behind the wheel.

He was supposed to meet with Thea and her companions.  If he stayed in Miami, he’d at least be near Sunrise Key, where they were headed.  But Miami was also a logical place for the Night World to hunt for him.  It was a lamia-and-vampire kind of town.  There weren’t any Black Dahlia clubs or witch covens in the whole —

A sharp noise made Noel jump.  It was the barking of a dog, he realized.   

A trail ran past the parking lot, a little superhighway for walkers, joggers, and rollerbladers in health-conscious South Beach.  Two men passed by, in their late twenties, by their looks. The one closest to Noel had platinum hair, obviously dyed, about a half-inch long.  He wore skintight black Lycra shorts and a black tank shirt with arm holes that fell halfway to his waist, showing off his sculptured torso.   He held a leash, and on the end was the dog that had barked, a pit bull leaning hard on its leash, straining toward Noel.   

“Don’t worry,” the man said loudly , seeing Noel lean away.  “She doesn’t bite.”

Then the platinum blond took in Noel’s faded shorts and wash-worn green T-shirt, the rawhide-and-moonstone necklace, and hiking boots, and his lips quirked.  But it was about the old VW van that he spoke.  

“Nice  ride,” he said, and his companion snickered.

Noel’s face heated yet again.  He watched them go. For one brief, unforgivable moment he had a fantasy: the platinum-haired man running from a pack of werewolves, falling, running again with his knees bleeding and his face twisted in terror ... Maybe Morgan was on the right side.  

_You can’t be thinking that!_ Noel reprimanded himself.  He put the van’s keys back in his pocket.  He was hungry.  He just needed food, and then he’d get on the road.  

Noel started walking.  And thinking.  South Beach wasn’t exactly a district of cheap grab-and-go food.  There were certainly excellent restaurants here, but Noel needed take-out. The only establishment he’d ever really been inside in South Beach was its lamia haunt,  and that wasn’t a good memory.

_______

  
_At the foot of a charmingly rickety wrought-iron staircase, Noel Phoenix looked up at the second-story club over a designer clothing store. It had no name, only a neon iris of purple so dark it was almost black._

_At the top of the stairs, he showed the bouncer his black dahlia tattoo.  The bouncer’s silver eyes flashed amusement and he said, dryly, “Oh, why not?”_

_Inside, the club was only about a quarter full.  There were a few solitary drinkers, and one table with a group of six young men clustered around it, dressed in black, palely attractive._

_Noel took a stool at the bar and asked the bartender, an Eminem lookalike with silver-blue eyes, what they had to eat._

_“Eat?” the vampire said, as if it were a dirty word._

_“Right,” Noel said, irritated.  “How about a shot and a beer.”_

_He gunned the shot and was just getting into the beer when he got that feeling of being watched.  And talked about.  He glanced into the mirror behind the bar and saw the group of lamia.  Noel dropped his gaze.  If they left him alone, he’d leave them alone._

_“— what you look like skyclad!”  The voice rode above the bar noise,  followed by laughter from the whole table.  Noel turned to look._   
_The lamia stopped laughing when he looked at them, and quickly they all looked away, as if embarrassed.  But as soon as Noel turned around again, they broke into a fresh round of low reaction laughter. No question, they’d been talking about him._   
_They were lamia, not witches, but they were the same kind of people he’d met in Circle Midnight._

_A chair scraped.  In the mirror, Noel saw one of them get up, walking his way. The others, whispering, watched his progress. The ringleader was tall and thin, with black razor-cut hair.  He smiled an insincere smile at Noel.  “My friends and I have a sort of bet,” he began.  “They think you’re a witch, but I say with all that hair you’ve gotta be some kind of shifter.”_

_His eyes were merry.  If he knew he was being rude, it didn’t bother him.  He was on his own turf, backed by his friends, the funniest guy alive._   
_“It’s all right, we don’t mind you’re in one of our clubs,” the vampire  said.  “So come on, honey, what do you say?”_

_“I say,” Noel laid money on the bar, “that the lamia are getting a little too inbred.”_

_He’d spoken loudly enough to be heard by the spectators at the table, and their offended gasps followed him to the door.  Noel took the stairs down to the street at a jog.  He’d never gone back._

______

_Stop thinking about that,_ Noel told himself now.  He scanned the facades along Ocean Drive, looking for the fastest- and cheapest-looking restaurant.  It was getting darker, and South Beach glowed with moonlight and neon.  The hour was too early for loud music to throb from the clubs.  

Which was why Noel heard the banjo.

It was plaintive and simple and cut right to the center of Noel’s attention without trying.  He looked for its source and saw a boy sitting crosslegged on a street corner, right in the heart of the expensive shopping district, playing a banjo. His longish hair was the color of raw honey.  His face had exquisite high cheekbones and black lashes, but his eyes were downcast and Noel couldn’t see their color. He looked about 17.  He was thin but not scrawny, underdressed in faded jeans and a flannel shirt, and cowboy boots.  And worst of all, in the heart of a district dedicated to materialism and self-indulgence, he was playing a protest song, the one about union organizer Joe Hill.

Noel laughed out loud. He was the only one, though.  The shoppers and diners who passed gave the boy gave him a wide berth, and not a few disapproving looks. _“ ... shouldn’t be allowed ...”_ Noel heard a well-fed businessman mutter as he passed.

As Noel watched, a car pulled up to the curb.  It was a charcoal-colored Mercedes.  The driver stayed behind the wheel as the back door opened and a man got out.  

The man was in his late thirties, with a widow’s peak of dark hair.  He moved lightly, like a predator.  His eyes roved over the young street musician’s lithe body and good cheekbones, and his gaze was like that of an owl looking down at a barn mouse.  

The predator moved closer, took a roll of bills from his jacket.  He peeled one off and tossed in it the street musician’s banjo case.  Noel could tell from the banknote’s freshness and stiffness it wasn’t a single, or even a ten, probably.  The boy didn’t notice that either, because he hadn’t looked up from his playing.  He merely said something — obviously thank you — and kept on with his hymn to organized labor.  

The predator spoke again, and this time the boy looked up.  He nodded, and the man smiled.

Noel didn’t like this, didn’t like it at all.

With no flourish or finale, the boy ended his song and began to pack up.  The rich man was waiting, his car idling at the curb under the control of an obviously hired driver.  A chill ran through Noel; he made a decision.  

Noel loped across the street in a break in traffic and came to where the young musician was kneeling, packing away  his instrument.  
“Don’t go with him,” Noel said to the boy.

“What?”  The man spoke before his intended victim could.  “Who the hell are you?”

Noel addressed the boy directly again. “This man will hurt you.”

The boy stood, lifting his banjo case.  He was taller than Noel by perhaps an inch.  He smiled at Noel as if Noel were a kind but hopelessly uncool freshman trying to ask out the head cheerleader.  “I’m sorry,” the boy said, “but I’m hungry.”

“Can we go already?” the man said, trying to sound bored.  

“I’ll buy you something to eat,” Noel put in. “I’ve got money.”

“Are you two working together?” the man demanded.  “I won’t go higher than $300.” 

It was almost funny, a Night Person and a depraved millionaire fighting over a human teenager who was most likely homeless. The boy looked from Noel to the man.  His eyes were gray-blue, clear -- not on drugs, in Noel’s judgment. And he was very self-possessed.  

“You’re real nice,” he said.  “But I can’t go with you.”

The millionaire smirked and got back into his car.  The boy turned to follow. As the kid turned away from him, Noel reached out, snake quick, grasped a few strands of the boy’s hair, and yanked.

Noel expected outrage, maybe even a scuffle, but the boy just gave Noel a strange glance,  almost a smile, and then slid into the Mercedes.  
Noel didn’t stand on the sidewalk along.  As the car pulled away from the curb, he dashed across the street behind its red taillights, making traffic squeal as drivers braked to avoid hitting him.

He didn’t make anyone feel any friendlier on the sidewalk as he ran among them.  Noel ran at about three-quarters of his best speed, all he could manage on a city sidewalk, and as he dodged pedestrians his mind was working too, thinking of what he’d do when he got back to his van.

In the driver’s seat, Noel rummaged in his dufflebag until he found some peridot and a length of black cord. Good, good.  He suspended the peridot from his rearview mirror, and then he tied the strands of blond hair around the cord. The charm didn’t swing in any particular direction; it moved in concert with the van’s motion.  Yet Noel felt it directing him.  Something inside him seemed to say, _this way ... Turn here._ He didn’t see the Mercedes anywhere, but somehow that didn’t worry him.

Just outside of town, Noel turned the van up a long private drive to where a beach house stood arrogant over some dunes.  The car wasn’t visible, but Noel thought it might be in the enclosed garage.  Nobody who could afford a car like that would leave it outside in the rain and the salt breezes.

The lights were out in the front windows. Noel circled the house. In the back, steam rose from a lighted and heated pool by a high flagstone deck, and a broad picture window of plate glass overlooked the whole area.  That window was lighted, unlike the ones in front, and from his safe, unseen place in the shadows Noel could see everything inside.

The rich man had his back to Noel.  He had something in his hand that Noel thought was a coiled whip.  A less familiar figure — likely the driver — was facing the window, and so was the kid.  The driver had his arm around the boy’s throat in a prohibitive choke hold.  The boy was standing still, not struggling.

_I knew it,_ Noel thought. Call the police? No, there wasn’t enough time.  He tried to think of a weapon he could use. The only thing that came to mind was his tire iron.

_You should have thought of that on the way up, stupid._

He ran to the van, then back with the tire iron in hand.  _Have to smash in the window, probably. All the doors will be locked —_

But when he got back to the flagstone patio, Noel saw something that startled him into stillness.The driver was doubled over, gripping his ribs, and blood ran from his nose.  The boy was free, with the rich man, predator no more, backing away. The whip fell from his hand. The boy spun, an easy roundhouse kick, and the rich guy fell, his reflexes undoubtedly slowed by age, by drinking and drugs, by easy living with nothing to fear.

The kid jerked him up to a kneeling position by his hair, grabbed the whip with his other hand, and wrapped it twice around the man’s neck. The rich guy was looking toward his hired man as if for help, but the driver was stumbling from the room.  He’d had enough.

There was a mirror in the room, and in it Noel could see the rich man’s face as the kid began to twist, tightening the whip like a garrote.    
The man’s face contorted, and he choked.  Noel was close enough that he would have heard through the glass if the man screamed, but of course, the guy couldn’t get enough air to do so.

Noel jumped up to the platform just before the window.  He banged on the plate glass with the sides of his closed fists.  “Hey! Hey, stop! You’ll kill him!”

If he heard, the boy gave no sign.

“Stop it!”  Noel saw himself in the mirror.  He looked like a guy in a soundproof booth,  trying to get someone’s attention, banging and yelling soundlessly ... it would have been funny, but the rich guy was turning cyanotic.

Noel picked up the tire iron, closed his eyes against flying glass, and swung.

The window shattered in a spider pattern.  Noel whacked at it several more times, making enough room to get through, and even as he stepped through, he was noticing something. The boy hadn’t even blinked, as far as Noel could tell, at the sound of shattering glass. Only in shapeshifters had Noel seen such intent attention paid to prey and the act of killing.

“Stop!”  Noel yelled again.  “You’re killing him!”

Nothing.

Noel thought of swinging the tire iron at the kid’s spine, but couldn’t bring himself to to do it.  Instead he dropped his weapon and grabbed the kid from behind.  He grabbed the boy’s bare arms, skin on skin.  An electric shock ran through Noel’s nervous system, and he yelled, _“Cy! Let him go! Now!”_

The boy’s face snapped up and he let go of the whip. He and Noel fell backward, to the floor. The rich man fell in the other direction and lay heaving.

The boy sat up and glared.  He didn’t look surprised to see Noel there.  “What did you do that for?”

“You were going to kill him! I couldn’t let you —”

“You saw what he was!  You were the one who told me not to go with him, you told me —”

“And you went anyway!” Noel countered, and then fell silent, realizing two things.  One, they were yelling at each other like they’d known each other for years.  Two, when he’d yelled earlier, he’d called the boy Cy.

They had never introduced themselves.


	4. Chapter 4

In the distance, a siren wailed.

The boy, Cy, leapt to his feet.  Noel followed his example.  “The driver,” he said.

“Yeah,” Cy said.  “He called the cops.  We got to go.”  He jumped through the window gracefully, moving like werewolves Noel had known.  

Cy seemed to understand the van was Noel’s.  It wasn’t locked, and they were inside and rolling in seconds, down the drive, the siren getting louder. Noel was driving.

“If they turn and chase us, we can’t outrun them in this thing,” Cy said matter-of-factly.

“No,” Noel said. 

But the police car raced past them, not stopping.  Noel was relieved.  He put the pedal down, putting distance between ...

_... between us and the scene of our crime,_ he thought. _Oh, dear Goddess._

Noel started to laugh.  Cy didn’t.  He looked over at Noel.  Noel kept laughing.  

“What?”

“What am I doing?”  Noel said, gasping.  “I’m not even supposed to be here.  I’m supposed to be ...  supposed to be ...”

He couldn’t think how he could begin to explain it to this kid.  He was still laughing, and his eyes started to tear up and he couldn’t see.  

“Let me drive,” Cy said.  “Hey, Noel, I ain’t kidding.  Pull over.”

The van shot across the median line and into a dirt and sand parking lot on the beach.  Noel brought the van to a stop, and climbed out, but instead of just trading places with Cy, he headed toward the sand.  He wasn’t laughing anymore.  In a minute he sat down on the sand and looked out at the long beam of light the moon made on the waves.  

Cy came and sat down next to him.  “You all right?”  he asked.  He had an accent, Noel noticed. Not the sharp twang of the Deep South, something a little further West, a smoky, honeyed sound.  

“Yeah,” Noel said, because it seemed like the thing to say.

“No you’re not,” Cy said. When Noel said nothing, Cy pressed him.  “Who are you? You in some kind of trouble?”

Cy’s eyes were all gray in the minimal light, but deep and endless, and they worked on Noel’s defenses and despite everything he’d been taught, everything he knew might happen, he told Cy the truth. He explained the Night World, his parents, Morgan, the rift, and Circle Daybreak.  He talked about the Wild Powers and how he was supposed to be one of them.  The only thing he didn’t mention was his prophesied death.

When he finished, Cy nodded very gently.  He put a hand on Noel’s arm, and said, “It’s okay.”

“What is?”

“You ran away from a mental hospital or something, right?  Your folks had you put away?”

Noel started to laugh.  

“It’s all right, Noel.  I won’t turn you in.  You helped me, and now I’m gonna  help you.”  He squeezed Noel’s hand.  “I get along fine with crazy people, some people think I’m crazy.  I just wish you hadn’t got me outta that rich pervert’s house before I could get some money.  ‘Cause I’m hungry, are you hungry?”

_____

They picked up takeout from a soul food restaurant on the side of the highway and ate at the beach, in the back of Noel’s van.  Although he didn’t believe anything Noel said about the Night World, Cy kept asking questions about it, as if he were trying to trip Noel up.  Of course, he couldn’t.  

“So there’s clubs, right?  Okay, take me to one.”  Cy was lying on his back with his hand wrapped around a bottle of Jax.  Noel sat nearby, finishing a Coke.  His hand and Cy’s were almost, almost touching.  But not quite.  

“I can’t do that,” he said.  “It’d be fatal.  They’d recognize you for human and kill you.”

“Oh, I see,” said Cy, clearly being sarcastic.

“They’d probably kill me too.” 

Noel wasn’t prepared for Cy’s response.  Cy glanced at him sharply, suddenly taking the ‘delusion’ seriously. “The hell they would.  I wouldn’t let them.  I’d kill them first.”

Without thinking, Noel said, “Like you were going to kill that guy in the beach house?”

Cy sat up.  “He didn’t have to put himself in that position.  He wanted to hurt me.”

“Hurt. Not kill, as far as we know.”

“Why are you taking his side?”  Cy’s voice cracked like an pre-adolescent’s.  

Noel felt very calm, even though Cy was angry with him.  “Why were you so ready to kill him?”

“I don’t got to explain myself to you, some lunatic who believes vampires and werewolves are chasing him!”

“Why are you so angry?”

Cy scrambled up and reached for the door.  The idea that he might actually leave filled Noel with alarm and he reached out to grab Cy’s arm.

And everything changed.  

_What are you doing? ..._ it was Cy’s voice, but it came from above and all around him, and Noel knew he was in Cy’s mind.

It was like being in a house, at first, but Noel realized the walls didn’t really join up, and parts of it were a classroom, and parts of it were outdoors.  Whenever Noel concentrated on a particular area, it seemed to gain focus, add detail ... 

He stood on the cracked gray-pink linoleum of a kitchen floor.  The kitchen smelled of frying oil from many breakfasts and dinners.  This was granddad’s place, granddad who’d tried to take care of Cy and his brothers, whose mother was dead and whose father was in prison.  

He moved slowly along a hall, a plastic carpet runner under his feet.  In the rooms the beds were unmade, and the smell of cigarette smoke lingered, but in through the windows he smelled the fresh breeze, a southern Louisiana wind, and from outside he heard the cries of nutrias. Yes, he wanted to go outside.  

The scene changed as soon as he had that thought, and he was outside, looking up at a rising moon.  He was alone, he was lonely.  He was different in a way he was terrified to let his family see.  So he hid it, fighting readily at any insult to make up for it, proving his manhood.  He’d become the wildest kid in two parishes, but suddenly his brothers knew his secret anyway.  His granddad was too old and feeble to do anything as his brothers threw his possessions on the front porch in a few plastic bags. _Go away, you’re no family of ours, queer._

The next room shifted around him, making him disoriented.   He couldn’t see very clearly in the dim light and the thick cigarette smoke.  In some ways it looked like an abandoned building, in others like a church-basement homeless shelter.  There was no one else there — just as there hadn’t been in any of the other rooms — and yet he smelled the odor of bodies metabolizing alcohol.  He was hungry and confused.  He wanted to get away.  Across the room, he saw a door painted black and moved towards it.

_Noel!  Don’t go in there_!  That was Cy’s voice. 

But he wanted to see.  Noel thought he was being brave. Whatever was behind there would let him understand Cy, and by understanding Cy he could help him.  

_I never go in there, I never go— !_

Noel opened the door and went in.

He was in a very small room that seemed to be lit by candlelight, but there were no candles anywhere to be seen.  The only thing in the room was a large, gleaming black coffin.  The sight of it raised an unexplained fear in Noel.  

His fear fast metabolizing into panic, Noel turned to leave and saw the door he’d come through was no longer there.    Wheeling, Noel looked for another exit, but there were only stone walls, and on each bloody handprints.

Was it possible, Noel wondered, to get trapped in someone’s else mind?  Was he stuck in Cy’s thoughts forever?  He put his hands on the wall and felt nothing but cool stone.  No, slightly wet stone.  He withdrew his hands and saw they wre bloody.  He’d left blood handprints on the wall.  There was blood on his hands.  His hands, his —

Noel dropped to his knees, panic overriding every thought.  _Cy, get me out of here, out of here, out of —_

“Noel!  Noel!”  

He opened his eyes.  Cy was poised over his body with a look of real fear.  

“I’m all right,” Noel said hoarsely.  He had that post-nightmare feeling.  He struggled to sit up.

“What the hell happened to you?” Cy asked.  He was shaking.  Noel’s going into that tiny room of Cy’s psyche had affected him as much as Noel.  Maybe more. Noel answered with a question of his own.  

“In that room, who’s in the coffin?”

Cy drew away from him a little.

“Cy?” Noel persisted.  

“Some stranger. Like the rich guy we just left,” Cy said, his voice low.  “You’re not asking the right question.” 

Slowly, Noel said, “Who killed him?”

Cy didn’t answer.

“You did, right?”

When Cy spoke, his voice was low.  “It was after my brothers threw me out.  I went down to New Orleans and tried to get by.  I never sold myself, so I nearly starved.  Then this man said I could come back to Mississippi with him.  Biloxi, on the water.  He said I could stay with him until I got back on my feet.  Said he was a widower, with plenty of room at his place, just wanted to help.”  

Noel was silent, dreading what was to come.

“The second night he came into my room and wanted to do things.  That’s when it happened.”

“But it was self-defense, right?”

Cy shook his head.  “Not really. I didn’t mean to kill him, but I was so angry.”  He glanced at Noel to see how Noel was reacting to this.   

“Maybe —”

Cy cut him off.  “You don’t know my family.  My granddad served 30 years on a manslaughter charge.  My father went to prison for armed robbery, and his brother died in Florida’s electric chair.” Cy drew his knees up to his chest and dropped his head.  “My whole family is like that. We’re all bad,” he said, sniffling. “When I killed that chickenhawk, I knew I was no different.”  

Noel moved over and put hisı arms around Cy, hearing him weeping. “It’s all right now.”

_Your soulmate is with you now._

The thought seemed to come from somewhere else, and it shocked Noel into silence. 

“Don’t,” Cy said.  It was nearly a moan.  “I saw parts of your life, too —”

A loud tapping on the window.  A flashlight was shining in.  Noel jumped, thinking of Night World assassins and wondering if he could reach the dagger in his bag in time, but then he saw the interloper was wearing a blue shirt and badge.  He slid open the side door a little and a police officer looked in.  

“Beach access here is only from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.,” the policeman said.  “After that, parking is prohibited.”

“I’ll move along,” Noel promised.

“Who’s that back there?”

The cop was pointing his light at Cy. He’d raised his face and the wet tracks on it showed in the beam.  

“Are you all right?”  the cop asked.

“I’m all right,” Cy said. His voice sounded like he’d been crying.  

“Uh-huh, and how old are you?”

“Seventeen.”

“You know this guy how?”  The cop was pointing at Noel. 

“I, uh —”

“Right.  What’s his name?”  the cop demanded.

“Noel.”

“Noel what?”

Cy looked blank.  

“Right, I thought so.  You want to get out of the van?”  

“Nothing’s wrong here, officer,” Noel said.  

“Look, you want to cruise, there’s lots of places you can cruise legal boys.  That means over 18.”

“I wasn’t —”

“Maybe not.  But it’s clear the two of you don’t really know each other, he’s crying ... I gotta think this might be a bad situation,” the cop lectured.  “Even if he says he wants to stay with you, I’ve gotta get him out of this situation, down to the station where maybe he’ll think about it.  Maybe without you right here, he’ll decide he’d rather call his folks and have them come pick him up rather than go around getting into vans with strangers.”

Noel’s face was hot with embarrassment.  

“It’s okay, Noel, I’ll go,” Cy said quickly.  He grabbed his banjo case and got out of the van.  As he did so, he looked back at Noel and spoke quickly, not caring if the cop heard or not.  “I saw parts of your life too,” he said, again. “You’re good.”

Then Noel’s soulmate followed the cop to the squad car.  He did not look back.

______

Back in Sunrise Key, a black car with a powerful engine crawled carefully along a beachside road, under the nearly full moon.  “I bet this is beautiful in the daytime,” Thea said, looking out at the moonlight on the ocean.

“It’s beautiful now,” Keller said, at the wheel, but she said it academically, like she was telling the time or the temperature.  “Help me look for this place, it’s not marked ...”

Even as Keller said it, Winnie cried, “Wait!  Back up!”

It was a charming little place, pastel paint glowing in the moonlight, a lemon tree scenting the air.  But there was no lights on inside the house, the outdoor lantern was dark, and there was no car parked anywhere near.  Keller’s eyes narrowed and she exchanged a knowing glance with Nissa.  As soon as the car came to a full stop, Nissa was out, running to the door.

“Uh, Keller, I thought we weren’t going to spook him,” Thea said uncomfortably.

“Oh, I don’t think we will,” Keller said, sourly.  “I don’t think he’s there to be spooked.”

Keller killed the engine and Thea opened the door to stand outside the car.  She saw Nissa raise her hand to knock, then stop.  Nissa’s hand beckoned for the rest of them to come closer.

The four of them read the message on the door in silence. 

“Now what?”  Winnie said.


	5. Chapter 5

Two ideas warred in Noel’s mind as he drove, well within the speed limit, north on the Interstate.  The first was that he needed to get to Daybreak as soon as possible, so that they could protect him from the Night World until this ridiculous Noel-is-the-Wild-Power misconception got cleared up. The second wasn’t much of an idea.  It was just Cy saying, _you’re good,_ with dried tear tracks on his face and a wistful, hopeless look in his gray eyes.  

Noel wanted to find him, wanted to tell him, _You’re good too, Cy, you just don’t realize it._

There were problems with that, of course.  The first was that he didn’t exactly know where to find Cy.  He could hardly to the police station and ask for him, not after the cop had made a point of separating the two of them.  If Cy was released — and he would be, because the police had no cause to hold him — then he’d have to go somewhere, but Noel had no idea where that somewhere might be.

The second problem was that the longer he circled around in Miami, the easier it would be for the Night World to trace his energy, wards on the VW van or not.  

The third problem was that while Noel’s heart told him Cy was good, Cy had confessed to to killing a man, not in self-defense, but in rage.  

Noel had known plenty of killers in the Night World.  Lamia and vampires who’d drank their prey dry, four witches in Midnight who’d killed a homeless person because they’d needed blood power for a particularly demanding ritual. Noel had detested these killers, their justifications, their repellent sense of entitlement to a human life.  Now, Noel was in love with a human killer.  

_In love?_

A memory came to him then, of Morgan telling him about his parents. They’d been soulmates, Morgan had said, explaining that the term came from an old theory that many souls split, long ago, in the process of reincarnation.  And their new incarnations are always searching for their other half, whether they realize it or not.  Legend had it that with true soulmates, the two souls could merge into one body with a kiss.  The two halves of the soul would simply reunite.

 _Really?_ Noel had asked.

 _No one’s seen it happen in modern times.  I think if it could happen, it would have happened to your parents, Alis and Darius.  They made me believe in soulmates._  

Noel believed in soulmates, too.  But for the longest time, he’d been afraid there weren’t soulmates for people like him.  
  
While these thoughts circled in Noel’s brain, inspiration struck from nowhere. _Theorn,_ he thought.

It was no solution to the dilemma he’d consciously been debating: about how to find Cy, or whether it was wise to even try. Rather, this was the solution to a problem his mind had probably been subconsciously working on all along: how to get in touch with Daybreak.  Thea had told him once that Thierry Descouedres’ very first name had been Theorn.  Hardly anyone remembered it nowadays.

Noel pulled off the road at a gas station and went to the pay phone.

“Do you have a listing under Theorn?” he asked.

“What’s the first name?”

“I don’t know; could you just search?”

“I have one listing,” said the operator.  “Here is that number.”

A young woman picked up.  She didn’t even identify herself.  “Hello, how can I help you?”

“My name is Noel Phoenix,” Noel said.  He didn’t have to say any more.

“Oh, thank God!”  The voice sounded even younger.  “Please hold on.”  

Noel heard her set the phone down.  A second later, she was yelling in the distance, as if she’d walked partway down a hall to call someone out of sight. Noel couldn’t make out her words, but it wasn’t hard to guess who she was hailing.

Someone picked up the receiver. “Noel?” a new voice said. “This is Thierry Descouedres.”

 _Goddess preserve me,_ Noel thought.  _I’m talking to The Man himself._   He didn’t sound as old as Noel would have expected.

“Hello?”

“I’m here,” Noel said.  

“Where are you?”

“North of Miami.  I had to run,” Noel said.

“You did the right thing.  We have agents down there, and Thea is with them.  But I don’t think you should meet up.”

“Why not?”

“If the Night World beat them down to Sunrise Key, it would be an easy thing for them to tail our agents and get to you that way.  We think it’s best if you keep going north.  There’s a Daybreak safe house in New Orleans —”

“That far?” Noel interjected, shocked.

“Sorry.  The whole area around the Gulf isn’t one we have a lot of people in.  There’s a Twilight coven near Pensacola, but I’m not going to feel safe until you’re actually in our hands. You realize, don’t you, how important you are?”

“That’s something we have to discuss,” Noel said.  “I’m not at all convinced I’m your Wild Power.  I think someone screwed up.”

“I know, Thea told me.”

“Did Thea tell you about the prophecy?  The other one?”

There was a beat of silence.  “Yes,” Thierry said.  “She did.”

“Prophecies always come true,” Noel said, “otherwise they wouldn’t be prophecies.  How do your seers and visionaries explain the paradox?’

Silence again. Then Thierry spoke.  “Our seers are pretty much just Aradia, and she’s not worried about paradoxes right now,” Thierry said.  “She just wants you with us and safe from the Night World.  We all do.”

Noel drew in a breath.  Then Noel said, “Well,˛I’m coming.”

“Good,” Thierry said.  “Merry meet again, Noel.”  The words sounded odd, coming from a vampire, but Noel understood that Thierry was wishing him well.  

_____

He drove as late as he could that night, but it had been a trying day.  Around midnight he felt too tired to go on, and pulled off at a cheap campground.  As he lay down to sleep, pulling a rough blanket over his body, he felt a chill of nerves.  Sleep was the time of greatest vulnerability, he thought, and rummaged in his bag for his silver dagger.  He fell asleep with his hand wrapped around it.  

Given the circumstances, Noel had thought he’d only sleep a few hours.  So he was surprised when he woke to brightness, and saw the sun high in a cloudless sky outside the side windows of his van.  Rolling over, he checked his watch: 10:45.  

“Son of a bitch,” Noel said, scrambling up.  He was relieved, underneath it all, to find that the Night World hadn’t tracked him down as he slept, but mostly he was irritated with himself for sleeping so long.  He had miles to cover.  Kicking the blanket aside, he jumped out of the van.  A cool shower would wake him up, Noel thought, and then he’d hit the road again and drive hard.    
  
On the highway, Noel pushed the speedometer needle up to 81.  And for hours, he got away with it.  Then there was a spurt of dust on the side of the road, behind a bush, and a black-and-white pulled out behind him, lights flashing.

Noel sighed, angry with himself, and eased off the gas.  Stupid, he thought.

The van crawled onto the shoulder of the road, and the cruiser followed.  After letting Noel sit for a moment, a deputy sheriff in a tan uniform got out and walked to the driver’s-side window.  

“Do you know how fast you were going?”

“Uh, I think there might be something wrong with this speedometer.  I thought I was keeping it under 70,” Noel said, tapping the glass for effect.

The deputy was unswayed.  “You were going way over that.  I clocked you at about 90.”

“Ninety?” Noel echoed.  His disbelief was genuine.  “It couldn’t have been.”

The deputy kept writing.  “Anyway, a mechanical problem is no excuse.  You’d better have that checked out as soon as you can.”  He tore the ticket from the pad.  But he didn’t hand it to Noel.  Instead he peered at the bag on the floor of the van.  “What’s in the satchel?” he asked.

 _None of your business,_ Noel thought, but he said, “My stuff.  I’m traveling.”  

“Where to?”

“Louisiana.”

“Crossing state lines, eh?  You wouldn’t mind if I took a look in your bag?”

Noel tensed.  There was nothing illegal in the van.  But it was Noel’s responsibility as a witch not to let humans see, much less rifle through, the sacred things witches used: herbs, crystals, tools.  They’d gotten through long stretches of human history underground and safe due to such secrecy.  

Noel knew it was his right to refuse a search. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But I’m kind of in a hurry.”

The deputy’s face turned to stone at Noel’s polite refusal.  “Would you mind stepping out of the vehicle?”  he said.

“Deputy Johnson,” Noel read his nameplate, “what’s this about?”

“Would you mind stepping out of the vehicle?”

Reluctantly, Noel opened the door and got out.  

“Follow me around, please, and stay where I can see you.”

They walked around to the van’s sliding door, which Johnson opened.  He leaned inside.

Noel had had enough of playing nice. He said, “Officer, if you go through my things without my permission, I’m going to sue you and your department.” He moved in to block the deputy’s way.

Johnson grabbed his arm and pushed him against the side of the van.  “You have the right to remain silent —”

“What? You’re kidding.”

“— anything you say will be used against you in a court of law.”  The deputy snapped handcuffs on Noel’s wrists.

“On what charge are you arresting me?”

“Assault on a peace officer.”

“Are you kidding me?”  Noel asked again, incredulous.

“You moved on me in a threatening fashion.  That’s assault.”

“Bullshit.”  But already Noel was being steered toward the cruiser.  Deputy Johnson put him inside, pushing down on the top of his head as he did so, just like on the cop shows.  The door slammed and Noel was in a cagelike backseat.  The back door bad no handles, even if Noel could have reached them with his chained hands.  Twisting around, he watched impotently as Deputy Johnson walked back to Noel’s van and went inside, obviously searching his things.  In a few minutes he returned, carrying Noel’s bag and his leather backpack as well.  He stored them in the trunk of his cruiser, then got behind the wheel.

Turning to look at Noel, he said, “You’ve got some real funny stuff with you.”

“Nothing that’s illegal.”

“We’ll see.”

As they made a U-turn in the road, Noel turned to look back wistfully at the van on the shoulder. He wished he’d kept his damn foot off the gas.  

______

There was a holding cell at the sheriff’s station, and through the doorway Noel could clearly see his bags on the floor through the doorway.    
Another man had joined the deputy.  He was older and wore plainclothes with a star pinned to his jacket.

“No marijuana, but there are several substances I couldn’t identify.”  The deputy squatted and took out a pound of a reddish powder.  “Like this.”

The older man opened the bag and smelled it carefully.

“Know what it is, sheriff?” the deputy asked.

 _It’s dragon’s blood, you idiot,_   Noel thought sourly.

“No, I don’t,” the sheriff said.  He lifted the bag and put it on his desk.  As Noel watched, he unpacked it.  His face grew more grave as he worked.

“I’m supposed to get a phone call,” Noel called to them. It was as if he hadn’t spoken.

“I think we’re looking at something darker than drugs here, Johnson.”  The sheriff held up Noel’s book of shadows.  “I’ve seen this before.”  

Noel had been wise enough to write everything inside in Latin. He’d also drawn a black dahlia on the cover, so that any witch would recognize it as something valuable even if they couldn’t read the contents right away.  It was the dahlia that the sheriff was looking at.  

Now, he said, “Johnson, why don’t you call Van Dyke?  The occult expert.”

The two men both turned to look at Noel.  He returned their gaze stonily. But when they turned away, he sat down on the floor of his cell.  He sensed that he wasn’t going to get an opportunity to cast a glamour.  They were already too suspicious, guards up.  He was in trouble.

If Noel called for help, who would come?  Daybreak had said they didn’t have operatives in the area ... except Thea and the Daybreakers she’d been traveling with.  If he closed his eyes and concentrated on her, would she know?  Would anyone else be able to hear his call for help?  Night People?  Would they hear and know his location?

And what made him think he could successfully call for help anyway?  He’d never used telepathy before.  He’d never even tried.  

Noel put his head in his hands.  _Dear Goddess,_ he thought. _Please help.  Please help._

_____

It was two hours before Van Dyke came.  He was a skinny, unprepossessing man with an acne-pitted face.  He wore a tie with a short-sleeved shirt.    
“I’m very glad you called me,” he said, looking at the items laid out on the sheriff’s desk.  “You were right; this flower is the insignia of a witch cult.”

 _Witch cult!_ Noel thought, almost laughing.  These occult experts couldn’t even get their terminology straight.  

The short-sleeved man went on, holding up a bag of heartsease.  “Don’t smell any of this stuff.  Don’t taste it.  Don’t even open it.”

Noel, who’d spent two hours in meditative telepathy, trying to call for help, thought it might be time to break his silence.

“You people are violating my civil rights,” he said. “I have not committed a crime.   If you let me go now, I’ll forget any of this happened.”  

They turned to look at him. The short-sleeved man walked through the doorway.  The other men followed.  Clearly the occult expert was in control.

“So that’s him?”

Noel and the acne-pitted man locked gazes for about a minute.  Noel simply refused to say anything in his defense or show any sign of fear.  The occult expert seemed to think they were having a battle of wills.

The sheriff became uncomfortable.  “He don’t look like much, does he?”

“Don’t be fooled,” Van Dyke said, still staring at Noel.

“What should we do?”  the sheriff asked.

“The old penalty is best,” Van Dyke said.

Deputy Johnson looked like he didn’t know what the occult expert was talking about.  The sheriff looked like he did, and wasn’t the most comfortable with it.  

“I don’t know, Mr. Van Dyke,” he began.  “That seems awfully severe.”

Van Dyke turned and walked rapidly back to the desk.  He held up Noel’s dagger.

“What do you suppose this if for?  Opening letters?” When his audience didn’t respond, he answered his own question.  “Sacrifices,” he said.  

He walked back to the doorway and slapped the dagger against his palm.  

“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” he said.    



	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Advisory: This chapter contains violent content that sensitive readers might find disturbing.

The two men had decided they couldn’t do anything until nightfall.  They left Deputy Johnson with strict instructions.  

“Don’t listen to anything he says.  He’ll trick you if he can. Or he’ll hypnotize you.  If need be, leave the station for a while,” Van Dyke had said.

The sheriff had weighed in, too. “We’re not gonna bring anyone else in this afternoon,” he told Johnson.  “Whatever they’re doing out there, we’re just gonna cite and release.”

Time passed in silence.  Deputy Johnson broke it.

“Anything special you’d like for dinner?”

Noel shook his head. It was the first humane gesture Noel had received, and it made him sick at heart.  He knew Johnson was following a time-honored tradition: the last meal. 

Johnson went out and came back with two dinners.  Noel surveyed his: macaroni and cheese, coleslaw, a biscuit.  Coke in a wax paper cup.  He couldn’t eat.  He watched Johnson, who was eating too.

They were, in a weird way, breaking bread together.  Noel knew that people formed bonds over food.  It was his best chance.

He started on the biscuit.  “You know, I’m really supposed to get a phone call.”

Johnson didn’t look at him.  “If this were only a matter of a civil crime, you would.”

“The thing your man said about the dagger isn’t true.  I’ve never sacrificed so much as a bird.”

Johnson chewed and said nothing.

“I don’t even eat meat.”

“Shut up.”

“You must realize—”

“Shut up!”  Johnson’s chair scraped back and he carried his dinner to the door.

Noel pushed his food away, unable to eat, believing he would surely die.

_______

Shortly after eleven they came for him.  “It’s quiet outside,” the sheriff told Johnson.  “Everyone’s home watching the late show, or in bed.”

Noel had resolved to struggle, and he did.  Pointlessly.  They handcuffed him, and the sheriff applied a bar under his neck until he stopped fighting and stumbled up the stairs. The town did seem to be asleep, but just as they got him to the cruiser, Noel saw two men walking on the sidewalk across the street.   They wore check shirts and jeans and ball caps.

Noel dropped, passive-resistance style, in the grasp of the sheriff and deputy.  At the same time he yelled, “Hey! Help me! I’m not a criminal! They’re going to kill me!”

The men looked over and saw Noel being wrestled into the cruiser.   The sheriff cupped his hand around and imaginary bottle and tipped his head back, pantomiming a heavy drinker.  

The men across the street started laughing.  

Powerless rage coursed through him, displacing fear. The sheriff lifted Noel’s legs off the ground and finished the job of getting him into the car.

“I’ll follow in my own car,” Van Dyke said.

The witch hunter would just be an observer, Noel thought, but he would go to make sure that the two lawmen didn’t lose their nerve.  Van Dyke was the pure iron in this witchhunt.  The other two were alloy.  

Noel thought of kicking at the windows for the benefit of anyone who might pass on the street, but realized that the chances weren’t good. He chose his old defense: talk.

“So how old-school is Van Dyke?” he asked the lawmen. “Is it going to be burning at the stake, the good old-fashioned way?”

The men said nothing.  
“Have you ever actually seen someone burn to death?  And heard and smelled it?” Noel asked.  “I bet you’ve gone on fire calls.  Your job normally is to save people from burning, isn’t it?”

“Shut up,” said Johnson, again.

“Is this what you became a cop to do?” Noel persisted.

“We’re here,” Johnson said.

They’d driven maybe five minutes.  Surprised, Noel sat up and looked out the window.  They were outside a one-story, nearly windowless cinderblock building.  A sign by the door read:  Animal Control.

The car circled the building, to a back entrance.  The two men pulled Noel out of the car and walked him to the front door, Johnson fishing for keys on a crowded ring.  Behind them a car crunched into the lot with its headlights off:  Van Dyke had arrived.

Inside, the building smelled like a kennel.  A few barks and yips heralded their entrance, muffled behind a wall.  They were at the pound. The men pushed Noel through an interior doorway, turning the lights on in a narrow room like a vet’s office.  A metal table was the centerpiece.  Noel understood then why they’d brought him there, and although he should have been relieved at being spared the stake, it drove terror into him.  His legs gave way beneath him and he couldn’t walk.

“No,” he whispered.  “No, no, no.”

“Get up,” the sheriff commanded.  

Noel couldn’t.  They dragged him.

The two lawmen heaved Noel onto the table.  They’d brought leather straps with them.  They improvised restraints, securing Noel to the table. Van Dyke looked on. Deputy Johnson didn’t look like the starched-uniform, stone-faced officer of the law he’d proudly been that afternoon on the roadside.  He looked like a kid not long out of high school, and under his crew cut his face was turning chalky.  

“Please don’t let them do this,” Noel said to him.

Van Dyke came closer.  “As late as the mid-19th century, executions were done at the county level. Under the supervision and authority of the sheriff.  Just like this.”  He laid a hand on Johnson’s shoulder.  “This is a painless and humane method.”

Johnson glanced at Van Dyke’s face, uncertain.  Van Dyke and the sheriff exchanged  looks.  

“Why don’t you stand guard in the front entry, Johnson?”  the sheriff suggested.  “We can handle things now.”  

Relieved, Johnson retreated.

The sheriff was looking through the cabinets.  “It’s a good thing Dr. Miller isn’t too careful about locking up his cabinets at night.”  He took out a small glass jar and read the label.  “And a good thing I’ve observed some of these procedures.” He set down two jars.  “Five cc’s of this will do for a 80-90 pound dog,” he said, “so 10 cc’s should work.”

“We didn’t weigh him,” Van Dyke said.

“I can eyeball people and get their weight pretty close.  Have to do it on the job, for suspect descriptions.  He’s 165, I’d say.”  

The sheriff stuck a hypodermic needle into the jar and drew back the plunger.  

Noel closed his eyes and began to whisper.  “Goddess of life, receive me, guide me, guide me to the other side.”  He wanted to go out dignified, but felt tears slip from under his closed eyelids.  

There was a pause.

“It’s a trick,” Van Dyke’s voice said.  “Go ahead and do it.”

Noel felt a strap tighten around his upper arm, tied there to raise a vein.  He heard a thumping noise from beyond the door. Then silence.

“Johnson?” the sheriff’s voice asked.  The deputy did not answer.

Noel opened his eyes.  The sheriff and Van Dyke were looking toward the door.  Two full hypodermic needles lay side by side on the counter. 

“I sure hope Dr. Miller didn’t come down here for any reason,” the sheriff said.  “I’ll go check.  You wait here.”

As the sheriff went out, Van Dyke picked up one of the hypodermics. Just then, there was another heavy thump outside.   “Sheriff?” Van Dyke called.

When there was no answer, Van Dyke’s glance darted down to Noel and back toward the door.  He was debating whether he should go investigate or stay guarding Noel.  Then he straightened his spine.  He put one hand hard over Noel’s mouth and jammed the needle into his arm and depressed the plunger.  Noel yelped, a muffled sound, and felt something cold spread under his skin.

The door swung open and Cy walked in. He looked calm. “Get away from him,” he said, softly.  

“Young man, you’re breaking town curfew,” Van Dyke said.  “And—”

Just then Cy saw the empty hypodermic needle on the examining table.  

“No!” Cy yelled.  “You son of a bitch!”  

Van Dyke blinked at Cy’s sudden fury, but he didn’t think to move away.  He fell the first time Cy hit him, and Noel heard the fleshy crack as his head hit a counter.  Noel closed his eyes, but couldn’t block out the sound of repeated blows that followed. 

But when he heard the cabinet doors being yanked open, Noel opened his eyes again, curious. Cy was going through the cabinets like a tornado, scattering boxes and jars out of his path.  Clearly, he didn’t find what he was looking over, because he cursed and kicked the fallen Van Dyke.   
When he came to Noel’s side, he wasn’t much gentler.  Yanking at the leather straps, Cy freed Noel from the table and pulled him to a standing position.

Immediately, Noel felt unsteady on his feet.  “I wanna sit,” he said.

“No!” Cy said sharply.  He drew back one hand and slapped Noel.  Hard.  Noel blinked.

“You got to walk and keep walking.  Pick ‘em up and lay ‘em down. If you can’t walk, crawl.” Cy gave him a little push.  “Do it.  I’ll be back.”

Noel walked his laps, back and forth across the room. Then he began to stagger.  His feet grew wider apart with each pace, except when they veered back in and tried to cross.

They crossed and Noel fell.  The impact of the linoleum, particularly against his forehead, woke him up a little.  He tried to lock his elbows as he crawled. That lifted his head and shoulders to what felt like an impressive height above the gray speckled linoleum.   
His crawling brought him to Van Dyke, who really didn’t look so good.  His head was at a funny angle on his neck, and his eyes were open, unseeing, reflecting the cold overhead lights.

When Cy got angry, he really got angry, Noel thought.  

He tried to reroute around Van Dyke’s body.  It was a long trip, like going around the cape of Africa or South America on his hands and knees.  Ah, here were Van Dyke’s shoes, ugly oxblood leather ones.  And here were more shoes, worn-out running shoes.  But these shoes were on their feet, so to speak.  They were upright and, Goddess, now they were moving.

Hands urged Noel to roll onto his back.  He looked up to see Cy, who was cradling him on his lap.  

“You came back,” Noel said happily.  Cy was so beautiful; why hadn’t he noticed before?  “I love you,” he said.

Cy laughed.  “I’m glad you got the strength to talk, but you’re drugged outta your mind.”

Noel felt a pinch in the crook of his elbow.  Cy was injecting him.  “Ow,” he said.

“It’s all right,” Cy said gently. “You’ll feel better soon.”  He looked away, briefly, like someone considering an action he knows he might regret later.  Then Cy leaned down and kissed him.


	7. Chapter 7

_Sixth sheep sixth sheep sixth sheep._

“Sixth sheep, sixth sheep, sixth ... I feel better,” Noel said.

He had dreamlike memories of getting up again with Cy’s help, walking some more with Cy supporting him, Cy who intermittently urged him to take sips from a can of Coke.    

When the stimulant Cy had injected him with began to take effect, Noel was allowed to walk on his own, holding the Coke himself.  Then came the tests, the tongue twisters and tracking Cy’s finger in the air.  The flashlight shining in his eyes to make sure they’d dilate properly.

“I’m not real happy with this,” Cy said.  “You oughtta see a doctor.”

“A human doctor?” Noel was alarmed.  “Uh-uh.  I want to see a healer from my own circle.”

“A witch healer?” Cy said doubtfully.   

“Yes. There’s a Twilight coven up in the Panhandle.”

Cy shrugged. “It’s up to you.”

Noel, who’d been leaning against the table, stood.  “How did you know what to do?” he asked.  His voice sounded just a little slurry to himself.

“I heard you,” Cy said.  “Your call for help.”

“No, I mean, to counteract the drug.”  Then Noel blinked. _Did he just say he heard my telepathic call for help?_ Maybe he’d misheard.  The drug hadn’t entirely worn off; it was making Noel feel lightheaded still, and confused.

“I knew a guy who dealt in Fort Lauderdale,” Cy said, in answer to his question. “We broke into a couple pharmacies, getting shit for him to sell. He told me when people OD on downers, you counteract with stimulants.  So I figured it was the same with you.”  Cy’s gray-blue eyes met Noel’s and his lashes lowered a little, defensively.  “I suppose you wanted to hear I read about it in a school library, right?”

After everything else he’d been through, Cy’s comment shouldn’t have stung, but Noel felt judged and found lacking.  He looked down at the dead Van Dyke.  The sight made his stomach turn a little.  Noel had not seen the sheriff or Deputy Johnson since they’d gone out into the lobby.  He hadn’t gone out there to look for them, either.  He was afraid of what he’d see.  Cy was wearing a shoulder holster and gun that had undoubtedly belonged to one of the two lawmen, and Noel didn’t want to ask about that, either.

“We should probably get out of here,” he suggested.

“Okay,” Cy said.  “Let’s go.”  

But he went into the long hallway of cages.  Noel, still unsteady on his feet and following more slowly, heard locks snapping open. Cage doors were swinging wide.  Cy was whistling and snapping his fingers when the dogs and cats inside didn’t come out right away.  “Come on, everybody out.”

The door at the end of the hall was propped open, and Cy was working his way up toward it, herding the animals out.  “Go on, all of you.”

The dogs trotted out, some craning their heads to look around, sniffing each other, already looking for a leader, forming a pack.  The cats leapt to the floor in more leisurely fashion, tails high, as though awakened from naps and readjusting to the waking world.  The animal procession made Noel feel better than he had since Morgan’s phone call.  

Outside, in the moonlight, Cy unlocked a Ford sedan.  

“Is this your car?” Noel asked.  

“No,” Cy said shortly.

“Whose is it?”

“Someone loaned it to me,” Cy said.  “Get in.”

Docile in his confusion, Noel got into the front seat.  Cy climbed in behind the wheel and slammed his door.  When Noel looked over at him, he saw the steering column was broken open with wires exposed.

“Why is all the wiring hanging out like that?” Noel asked2.  He already had an inkling, but the drug was making his mind run slow.

“My friend couldn’t find his spare key for me,” Cy said.

Noel shook his head slowly.  “You stole this car.”

“I had to help you.”  Cy touched two wires together and the engine came to life.  “You were hours away.  What was I supposed to do, hitchhike?”

“I’m glad you came,” Noel said.  When Cy didn’t respond, he repeated himself.  “I’m glad you came.  It’s okay that you stole a car.”

“Thanks,” Cy said.  “Your approval means so much.”

Once they got out of town, true dark surrounded the highway.   The broken yellow line flashed by at staccato intervals.  Noel put his head against the frame of the car, near the window, and listened to the sound of the engine and the hum of tires on asphalt.  It was a mind-dulling, mesmerizing sound, making him sleepy.

Had he imagined it, or had Cy kissed him back in the animal shelter?  No, surely Noel had dreamed it, but what a tender dream; Cy’s long hair had brushed the edges of Noel’s face like a caress to go along with the kiss ...

Cy poked him in the shoulder. “Don’t fall asleep,” he said.  “Sit up.  If you’re having trouble staying awake, we should talk.”

“Okay,” Noel said, straightening.   

So they talked.  Actually Noel did. He told Cy more about the Night World, about Daybreak and the Night People finding human soulmates.  He explained the soulmate principle, the legend of souls being split, the apocryphal tale of souls merging with a kiss. That led to the story of his parents and their deaths, the early memories of the human foster home he’d lived in as a small child, and his rescue by Morgan.  The pain of never being able to manifest his mother’s powers.

“Some leaders in Twilight told me that fear might be holding me back,” Noel said.  

“What did they think you was afraid of?”

“Hurting people,”  Noel said.  “The power of fire is an amazing thing.  And they knew I saw so many people in Midnight who just didn’t care who their powers hurt, and said maybe I didn’t want to be like them.”

“So why didn’t you join this other coven, Twilight?”

“Circle,” Noel corrected. “Circle Twilight.  Because of Morgan, I guess.  He was Midnight, and I didn’t want to disappoint him.  Besides, I also thought the people in Twilight just felt sorry for me, and I didn’t want pity.  I think they believed I was really scared of something else.”

“Like what?”

Noel drew in a deep breath.  “I think they thought I was really afraid of something else:  that if I had the Phoenix powers I’d be pushed too hard, trained too fast, and die like my mother.”  Noel paused. “I lost both my parents young, and I guess something like that can make you afraid of the world.”

“Some people, I guess,” Cy said.  “I lost both my folks young.  My mama died, and daddy went away to prison, and we knew he wouldn’t be out for twenty years, maybe never, if he killed someone in the prison yard.  And knowing the men in our family, that was actually a likely thing.”  He reflected. “I knew I had no one backing me up, and it taught me that if someone hits you, you gotta hit back and twice as hard.”

Neither of them spoke after that.  Presently, the first rays of morning gold were splashing the landscape and brightening the sky from its otherwordly predawn color as Cy got off the highway onto a rural road.   

“Turn up ahead,” Noel told Cy after about five miles.

In ten minutes they were at a beautiful, run-down mansion, its gallery roof sagging under the assault of flowering vines.  As the car ground to a stop in the yard, a tricolored tropical bird sailed past them to perch on the scrolled iron of the fence.  The ocean wasn’t immediately in sight, but Noel could hear and smell it.

A tall woman with a single blond braid, wearing a loose gray dress, opened the door.  Her eyes took in the two young men on the porch.  She squinted very slightly at Noel, signaling vague recognition.

“Unity,” he said. “Noel Phoenix, of Circle Twilight.” 

“Merry meet,” she said, but her eyes had already settled on Cy and she spoke to him next.  “Young man, you can’t come in here with that weapon.”

Her tone of disapproval wasn’t lost on Cy, but he smiled at the witch as if unperturbed.  “I’m not coming in at all,” he said.

“You’re not?” Noel said.

Cy jerked his thumb over his shoulder, “I’ve got to get rid of this stolen car.”  

The woman’s gray-blue gaze turned even frostier.

Cy explained what had happened to Noel, finishing with, “I wanted to take him to a doctor, but he wanted you folks.”

“We can take care of him,” the witch said.

“Good.” Cy loped back down the porch steps, loose-limbed and full of energy.  

“You’re coming back, right?” Noel said.

“I’ll catch up with you down the road,” Cy said, not turning around.  It wasn’t the most specific promise in the world, and Noel felt a pang of sorrow watching him go.  

The witch touched his arm.  “Come,” she said.

He turned and followed her through the doorway into a wide entryway with a wood floor.

“My name is Abra,” said the woman, once they were both inside.  “How, in the name of Hellewise, did you get injected with euthanasia?”

“Witch hunters.”

“Oh, Goddess,” whispered Abra.  “Oh, Goddess, tell me that isn’t true.”

“I wouldn’t make something like that up,” Noel said.

“How are you feeling?”

Noel thought.  “Fine, except that my soulmate is crazy.”

_______

Treatment consisted of a vile detox brew, an herbal bath and a purifying ritual in a ring of white stones. Noel had to admit it made him feel a lot better.  After it was all over, he was allowed to nap for most of the afternoon in a third-story bedroom with a view of the ocean.  

While there hadn’t been many people at home during the day, all of the witches were back in time for a vegetarian supper, and then Noel was the coven’s guest as they had a circle. In the morning, Abra promised, one of the witches would provide him with safe conduct to the Daybreak house in New Orleans.   For tonight, she said, he needed more rest.

In Noel’s dreams he heard his mother singing, far away in the rooms of an unfamiliar house.  Noel searched for her, but when he finally came to a bedroom at the end of a long hall, the singing had stopped.  He peeked in and saw his mother lying in a big bed under many quilts, her thin face red in some blotchy areas and snow white in others.  She was sweating and shivering.  Her temperature in freefall, she was dying.

A knot of witch healers stood impotently around the bed.  One of them caught sight of Noel in the doorway.  Suddenly there were whispers.  T _he Phoenix heir,_ one said.  _Last of the Phoenixes.  Last of the Wild Powers._

“Noel,” one of them cooed, a trickster smile spreading across his face.

Noel ran.  They gave chase immediately and caught him. Then he felt the cold metal of the veterinarian’s table against his back.   He fought to free himself.  

_You have to,_ they said, forcing him down.  _Wild Power.  Phoenix heir. Don’t you know how important you are?_

Noel fought to free himself from hard, compassionless hands ...

“It’s all right, it’s all right,” a familiar voice whispered in his ear.  “You’re safe.”


	8. Chapter 8

Noel was awake.  In the tiny bedroom of the Twilight coven’s house, he was sitting up in bed.  Cy was holding him close, stroking his back where sweat was beginning to soak through his T-shirt.

“See? You’re safe now,” Cy said.  

Over Cy’s shoulder, Noel could see that the window was open.  There was no need to ask how Cy had gotten in. He pulled back.  “I’m all right,” he said.  “Thank you.”

“Are you really all right?” Cy asked.  “A clean bill of health?”

“Yeah,” Noel said.  

“I drove your van down from Bannockburn.”  At Noel’s blank look he said, “That town you got arrested in.”

“Oh.  Thanks.”

“Well, I figured you’d need it.  You’re still going to New Orleans, right?”

“Oh, yes,” Noel said.  

They sat companionably for a moment in silence.  Then Noel ventured, “You could come with me, you know.”  Even as he said it, he was steeling himself for rejection.  

But Cy said, “I suppose I could.  I’ve never met anyone who needed protection more than you.”

Noel smiled.  “I guess I deserve that.  I need more than protection, though.”

Cy looked at him, saying nothing.  Noel’s heart was tripping, he was nervous, but he leaned forward to brush his lips against Cy’s.  One hand came up, gently, to Cy’s shoulder, for balance.  And as Noel touched him, he felt Cy lean into him, too, kissing him back.  Sweet relief, no, joy swept through Noel and warmed his veins.  

Then it happened again.  Without warning, he was in Cy’s mind.

This time, however, Noel wasn’t in the chaotic drowning pool of Cy’s past.  This was the present.  He was in a warm and safe room, lit with a diffuse flickering light, as if from a bonfire that Noel couldn’t quite see.     

Someone was here, Noel realized.  Someone other than Cy, whose mental presence Noel remembered as being volatile as quicksilver.  No, this was someone else, someone strong and steady, like a rock in the whirlpool of Cy’s life.  

There were flickering images on the walls of Cy’s mind, like shadows cast by the unseen bonfire.  As Noel looked closer, the images began to take on color, and the features came into focus.  They were all the same person, Noel began to understand, a young man with a face as serene as a saint in a Renaissance painting. Yet he was also sensual, with sun-warmed skin and tawny hair and wide-set hazel eyes, warm and deep and kind —

 _Holy shit!_ Noel thought in sudden recognition. It was him. This was how Cy saw him, this beautiful idealized image that no mirror had ever shown Noel.  

Noel broke the kiss and lay breathing hard.  Somehow he had come to be lying down again on his back.  Cy, from his position on top of Noel, raised his head and looked quizzically down.  “What’s the matter?”

He couldn’t possibly explain, but somehow he had to say that he wasn’t worthy of the kind of love and respect he’d seen inside Cy’s mind.    
“I don’t deserve this,” he whispered.

“Deserve what?” Cy said, and moved a little lower, his hips settling against Noel’s thighs. Without waiting for an answer, he began nuzzling Noel’s chest. The sensation wiped all rational thought from Noel’s mind. Cy’s hands slipped around Noel’s haunches, and his grip was like iron, but Noel didn’t want to escape. Cy kissed the hard spot where Noel’s ribcage ended, and then moved down to his stomach.  It was clear where he was headed and Noel moaned in anticipation.  

“Please, hurry,” he implored.

Cy lifted his head, and suddenly he sat up, straddling Noel so that his arms were pinned.

“Oh, Goddess, don’t stop.”

 “I thought people in Circle Twilight were supposed to be patient.”

_“Please.”_

Cy ran a finger over Noel’s lips.  “Shhh, begging won’t help.”  

Noel hardly heard the click as the doorknob began to turn, but Cy did, and had excellent reflexes.  He half-rolled, half-dove onto the floor and scrambled under the bed as the door opened.

Abra, dressed in a floor-length white gown, said, “I heard you moaning.”

“I had a nightmare.”  Goddess, he was really pitching a tent.  Was she just pretending not to notice?

Abra sat on the edge of his bed. “But you’re all right?”

“Fine.”

“Are you just going to keep pretending the young man who brought you here isn’t under the bed?”

With a scraping noise, Cy pulled himself out.  There was dust on his hair.  

“I thought you didn’t want to set foot in this house,” said Abra coolly.

“I left the gun outside,” said Cy, his voice polite.

“I don’t think you understand.  Everyone here has the greatest reverence for life.”

Not everyone could have seen the hurt in Cy’s eyes, but Noel did. “What’s going on?” he interrupted.  

Abra was staring a hole in Cy.  “Two dead and one gravely injured in Bannockburn. The whole town is in terror.”

“They were witch hunters.  Killers themselves,” Cy said.

“And the security guard at the shopping center in the next town over?”

“I had to get into the pharmacy somehow.  He’s not dead, is he?”

“He’s lucky to be alive.”

“Noel was nearly in a coma.  I didn’t have time to infiltrate through the vents.”  

Noel broke up their heated exchange.  “Abra, he’s my friend.  I want him here.”

Cy shook his head.  “I just came to bring your van and your stuff. I’m leaving.”

“I’ll go with you,” Noel said.

“No,” Cy said sharply.

Noel shot a glance at Abra. “Can I please—”

“Talk to your friend alone?  Of course.”  Her words were courteous, but there was something disdainful in her politeness, as there was in her posture as she retreated, closing the door behind her.

Cy had moved to the window, but now he stopped to face Noel.  He was waiting for Noel to speak, but he looked determined not to be appeased by anything Noel might have to say.

“She’s a bitch,” Noel said.  

“Yeah.”

“So stay.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Why?”  Cy countered.  “Because I’m your ‘friend’?  That’s what you said.  Not ‘soulmate.’”

“You are my soulmate.  I’ll tell anyone that.”

“No,” Cy said.  “You’re not ready to admit that someone like me could be your soulmate.” He ran a fingernail through the flimsy lace curtain on the window.  Noel could hear the lace shredding, and winced.

“I killed two people last night. It could have been more,” Cy said.  

“I know.” Noel found himself hoping it was Deputy Johnson who had survived.

“Can you tell me you’re comfortable with that?”

Noel knew he should lie, but he hated lying.  “No. But Cy, you don’t have to be like that.  Everybody has a dark side, but you don’t have to let it rule you.”

“What if I don’t just have ‘a dark side?’ What if  I’m all dark?” Cy asked.  “Maybe it’s my nature to be a killer.”

“You can change.  Everyone can.”

Cy’s pupils were wide, and Noel thought he was softening.  Encouraged, Noel went on. “After all, the men you killed in Bannockburn were trying to hurt me.  That’s self-defense, sort of.  The man in Biloxi was a sexual predator, and ...” Noel paused, uncertain.  

“And?” Cy said stiffly.  

“Nothing,” Noel said, realizing he’d taken the wrong path.  

“You were about to ask if I’d killed anyone else I haven’t told you about, is that it?”

Now that the awful possibility had been raised, Noel wanted to know.  “Are there others?” he whispered.  He wanted Cy to say no.  He wanted it badly.

“Is that what you think?” Cy demanded.

“Just tell me,” Noel said softly.

“If that’s what you think, then fuck you.  Fuck all of you,” Cy said, and jumped up onto the windowsill and out.

Noel sat on the bed and put his head down on his knees.  Tears welled in his eyes. _I can’t stop loving him, but I can live without him for the rest of my life.  And I will._

The bedroom door opened and Abra entered without knocking.  

“I could feel your negative energy from three doors down,” she said.  “If your powers were stronger you’d be shaking the house.”

Noel looked up at her with wet eyes.  He had a feeling she wasn’t here to offer hot chocolate and sympathy.  A lecture was coming, and he really wasn’t in the mood.

“Your ‘friend’ is gone,” she observed.  “You may not realize it now, but it’s for the best that you break off that kind of an unhealthy relationship sooner rather than later.”

It was already broken, but Noel didn’t feel like giving her the satisfaction of knowing that.  “Who are you to judge?” he said quietly.

“You are made in the image of the Horned One,” Abra said.  “ ‘Man to woman, woman to man, ever since the world began.’”

“I’ve heard that before.  I didn’t think it was an order.”

She laid a hand on his shoulder.  “There are some beautiful young women in Circle Twilight.  Spend more time with them.  You’ll find that your feelings will change.”

“Abra,” Noel said, “go away.”  

She pulled her robe more tightly around her, gave him her frosty blue gaze one last time, and left. When she was gone, Noel decided that he’d never get back to sleep again without help.  Surely there was herbal tea in the pantry.  He slipped out of bed.

In the kitchen, Noel found he wasn’t alone.  A crone sat at the table, her iron-gray hair loose, her face deeply lined.  She might have been seventy, or she could have been 100.  Noel couldn’t tell.  She was cupping a mug of tea between her hands.

“Uh, good evening,” Noel said.

“Merry meet,” she said, giving him the traditional greeting.  Her slate blue eyes appraised him.  “Are you sneaking off to look for your soulmate?”

Noel gave her a startled glance.  She chuckled.

“I don’t sleep that well.  I notice lots of things.  Like the wards being disturbed.”  She stroked a dark gray cat in her lap.  “Abra is easily shocked for a woman her age, isn’t she? Naive.”

“Did you hear us talking?”

The crone didn’t answer him directly.  “Young people think they invented everything about that’s unusual about sex,” she said.  “Your generation thinks its sexuality has unique problems.  And unique pleasures.”  Her gaze was piercing.  “But young men have always done the things they’ve done.  And young women too.  There’s valerian tea yet in that pot.”

The crone said all of this with the same casual inflection, as if it were all just conversation made to pass the time.

“Thank you,” Noel said, and took down a tea cup from a hanging rack.  While pouring, he said,  “I think maybe I should let him go.”  

“Why is that?”

“He’s ...” Noel turned to look at her again. “He’s hard to deal with.  I keep finding him and losing him again.  Maybe it’s not meant to be.”

He wanted her to contradict him, but she didn’t.  Not directly.  

“Only the Goddess knows,” she said.   She stood.  “I believe I could sleep now.  Merry part.”  Taking the tea with her, she left.  

Noel sat at the kitchen table, drank his tea, and thought.  He wasn’t sure if it was making him sleepy, but perhaps it cleared his mind, because he realized there was something he had to do.

Noel didn’t know whether Cy had killed more than the three people that Noel knew about, but Cy’s refusal to deny it disturbed him.  Cy believed himself evil.  More than that, irredeemable.  That was the reason he’d been so quick to believe Abra saw him as a conscienceless killer; it was why he was cut to the quick by Noel’s question.  And now Cy was out there in the world, with a chip on his shoulder, a hair-trigger temper and -- _Goddess help us all_ \-- a gun.

A storeroom off the kitchen held all the ingredients Noel needed.  Back upstairs, close examination of the sheets revealed a hair lighter than his own.  Noel plucked it carefully from the bed.

Then he made a human form, wrapped it with the hair, and named it Cy.

“I bind you, Cy.  I bind you from killing and from doing grievous injury,” Noel whispered, over and over, in the moonlight.


	9. Chapter 9

The following morning dawned bright and clear, as most days probably did here.  Noel went out to his van.  Cy had spoken the truth; all his things were accounted for inside.   He slid the van’s side door shut.  

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a figure burst from the front door of the house and come the halfway down the steps, midnight-blue dress swirling around her calves.  Abra.  

“What are you doing?” she called, startled. 

“Leaving,” he said, opening the driver’s side door of the van.  

Alarmed, Abra came down the rest of the front steps and hurried to the van’s side.  She caught the door before he could close it.   Behind her, a young woman emerged from the house to stand on the gallery and watch them.  

“You can’t leave,” Abra said.  “Brigid is going to drive with you to New Orleans, like we arranged.”

Noel glanced at the gallery, where Brigid watched them.  She had long, black hair.  Like Blaise Harman. 

“In what capacity?” Noel asked.  “For extra protection?  Or as my date?”

Abra’s eyes turned a little colder.  He saw she hadn’t forgotten their late-night conversation. 

“You shouldn’t make this trip alone,” she insisted.

“I wouldn’t be,” Noel said, “if you hadn’t run off my —” 

He stopped.  Abra really hadn’t run his soulmate off.  Noel had done that part himself.    “Just move your hand,” he said.  

Abra did not take her hand off the doorframe.  “For the love of the Goddess —” she began.

Noel yanked on the door, and Abra jerked her hand away before the door slammed.  The van’s engine sputtered to life.  Noel looked out the window at Abra.  “I’ve had just about enough of the love of the Goddess,” he said.

He left them all in a cloud of yard dust.

_____

Noel headed toward New Orleans.   He didn’t know what else to do.   All he wanted was to go back home to Sunrise Key,  but that didn’t seem feasible.

As he was crossing a wide trestle bridge in Mississippi, his cell phone rang. Noel glanced at it, sharply, curiously.  Thierry had said no one in Daybreak would contact him on his cell phone, due to the instability of transmissions.  

 _Morgan?_ Curious despite his fear, Noel pulled off the road to answer.

Cy wasted no words.  “What did you do to me?” he demanded.  

He’d found out about the binding spell.  Noel’s heart sank in his chest.  “Oh Goddess, you didn’t try to kill someone already, did you?”

“What are you talking about?  No, I didn’t.  I don’t know what you did, but it feels wrong.”

“I did a binding spell.  It’ll only keep you from killing or seriously injuring someone,” Noel said.

There was a beat of silence while Cy absorbed that.  “I want you to take it off.  I don’t like it.”

“Why?” Noel said.  “If you’re not going to kill anyone, it shouldn’t matter.”

“I don’t care! You had no right,”  Cy said fiercely.  “Are you going to take it off or not?”

“No,” Noel said heavily.  “Sorry.”

The phone went dead in his ear.  Noel set the phone down on the seat next to him and put the van in gear.  Just as he did, the phone rang again.

“Cy, listen,” Noel said, picking up.

“This is Thierry Descoeudres.”  

“Thierry.”  It took Noel a moment to adjust.  “I thought you weren’t going to call me on this line.”

“I wouldn’t have, except you left me no choice, by leaving the safe house unaccompanied and without making your itinerary clear.”

“Did Abra call you?”

“Yes, she did.”

 _Oh, no._

“She explained about the young man you were with.”

_That bitch, that meddling bitch._

“If you’re looking for him, that can wait.  We can send people after him for you, but —”

Noel couldn’t hear him anymore.  He was experiencing an emotion almost foreign to him, one he never let himself acknowledge.  Noel Phoenix was truly angry.

“What are you saying?”  Noel said.  “Circle Daybreak is going to go out and _procure_ for me? Is that one of the services that comes with being a Wild Power?”

On the other end, Thierry seemed too taken aback to speak.

”Maybe if you can’t find Cy,” Noel continued, “you’ll find me someone who looks a lot like him.”

“This is wasting time.” Now Thierry was angry, too.  “You need to be where we can protect you.”

“Like Circle Twilight protected my mother?” Noel said. “It’s the same damn thing, isn’t it?  It’s not even me you would be protecting, it’s your goddamned blue fire.”  

“That’s not —”

Noel broke the connection and sat staring blindly out at traffic for the space of a few seconds.  Then the phone began ringing again. Leaping out of the van, he threw the ringing phone into the water below.

“Leave me alone,” he whispered.  “All of you, just leave me the hell alone.”


	10. Chapter 10

"Good evening," a voice said at Noel’s elbow.  "Mind if I sit here?"

New Orleans was full of bars.  It hadn’t been hard for Noel to find one that was to his specifications:  nondescript, dark, and full of humans.  The kind of place Night People would never go.  When the door opened, sunset light slipped in.  It was hardly evening yet, despite what the stranger next to Noel had said.

Noel turned to look.  The newcomer was maybe a year or two older than Noel, tall and thin with very light blonde hair and kind blue eyes.  

“What’s your name?” Noel asked.  

“Jude.”

A lovely non-lamia, un-witch-like name.  Noel took a bar napkin and quickly began sketching a dahlia on it, in black pen.  He might have looked like he was absently doodling, but he glanced up as he did so, and asked, “Got a favorite flower, Jude?”

Jude looked a little taken aback by the question.  “I never really thought about it before ... I guess bird-of-paradise, they’re kind of showy.”

His puzzlement was clearly genuine, and Noel smiled for the first time.  “Please, sit down,” he said.  

Jude did.  “What are you drinking?”  he asked.

“Rum, straight.” 

“Can I get you another?”

“Don’t let me stop you,” Noel said.

Jude ordered another rum for Noel and a martini for himself.  They talked idly and drank, and ate a little from the Happy Hour food the bartender had set out.  Jude’s hand brushed lightly against Noel’s. Twice. Noel understood the signal. That was just what he needed: an anonymous mattress somewhere with a human lover.  No backgrounds, no inhibitions. 

"Want to go somewhere else?"  Noel suggested.

_____

Hours later, still sobering up, Noel came down the back stairs of Jude’s apartment.  His skin felt flushed and sweat was cooling on the back of his neck.  Clouds had covered the moon, though, and summer rain was threatening. Noel didn't see the tall figure in the shadows until it stepped out right in front of him.

"Hey!" Noel stumbled back, thinking some clumsy human had gotten in his way.  He still wasn’t one hundred percent sober.  "You startled me."

“Don’t be scared,” a familiar voice said. Light glinted off a lodestone amulet.

“Morgan,” Noel whispered, and the shock that raced through his nervous system chased away any lingering haziness from the alcohol.  He shifted his weight to run in the opposite direction, but it was too late.  He felt a psychic blow like a sledgehammer to the critical parts of his brain.  His last thought was _Cy, I'm sorry._

______

Noel awoke to the dripping of the rain on the timbers of a barn roof, and smelled a scent like the wind off a marsh. He opened his eyes.

It really was a barn.  He was up in the loft.  A lantern hung from the wall, its flickering light illuminating the loft in a way that Noel could only think of as witchy. His arms were stretched out to his sides and chained, and when he lifted his head he saw that his whole body lay in a chalk circle, an elaborate design that Noel knew was magical.

Morgan's work.  Morgan had been here for hours, preparing this. It was a circle of protection, the kind you use to control a powerful spirit.  Like a demon. 

Morgan was watching him from the shadows.

"Why all the protections?” Noel asked.  “It's just me."

Morgan shrugged.  "A precaution," he said.  "You have powers deep inside you, Noel. You've never been able to use them before, but then, you've never had this much incentive."  He moved to the circle's edge. "The chains are largely unnecessary.  You would never survive the burns you'd get breaking the circle."

"Then why use them?"

"Trapped men do strange things, suicide among them,” Morgan explained.  “The only person who can cross the line safely is the person who drew the circle. I didn’t want you throwing yourself out and being seared on the spot.” 

“Although that would have a pleasing irony, wouldn’t it? The last Phoenix, burning to death?”  

Morgan looked surprised.  “I didn’t expect gallows humor from you, Noel.  You’ve never shown that kind of toughness before.  But no, I wouldn’t want such a painful death for you.”

Noel drew in a breath, trying to stay calm.  He didn’t believe that there was any escape for him, and the panic which was threatening to overtake him would only ensure that he’d die an undignified death, like a whimpering dog.   His parents would have expected better.  

“Why, then,” he asked, “why not just let Night World assassins make a quick, clean execution?  Why come all this way yourself?”

Morgan nodded, as if judging the question fair.  “I felt I owed it to you,” he said.  “I raised you myself.  I failed you.  If I had done a better job, you would be solidly on the side of the Night World right now. We would have one of the Wild Powers, and nothing to fear from Daybreak. And that way, you wouldn’t have had to die.”  

Noel saw an opening. “What if I told you there was still a chance of that?”  he said. 

Morgan wasn’t deceived.  “You would be lying.”  

“I told off Thierry Descoudres today.  If I wanted to be with Daybreak, I could have been at their house four times over by now.”

Morgan shook his head sadly.  “I wish I could believe you, Noel.  But if you wanted to be on the side of the Night World, you could also have contacted me, many times by now, and you did not.”

Noel swallowed.  He had to admit Morgan had a point.  

“I cannot take a chance on you,” Morgan said. “A Wild Power on our side would have meant likely victory, but a Wild Power dead means certain victory.”  He paused.  “You don’t know how much I wish we had been successful in killing one of the other Wild Powers.  If we had, I could let you live.  But they are safe with Daybreak now, and you are the only one left open to us.”

Morgan stepped across the line, into the circle.  “It’s really too bad,”  he said, sitting on his heels by Noel’s supine body.  “I would have understood, as few other people could have, your fascination with that young human.”

Curiosity almost distracted Noel from his fear.  He hadn’t been expecting to hear something like that.

"I loved your father very much.  The day I had to stand by his side and pretend to be happy as he married Alis Phoenix," Morgan sighed, "that was the worst day of my life."  He reached down and stroked Noel's hair back from his forehead.  Noel flinched away from the touch, but Morgan didn’t seem to notice.  "You've always been special to me because of that."

“If you’re going to kill me, kill me, but get your hand off me.  Your touch makes me sick.”

Morgan’s eyes turned cold, and he took his hand away.   

"Good. Get on with it," Noel said stiffly.

"Not yet," Morgan replied.  "We're going to have a visitor.  Someone I don't think I like very much.  Someone who'll be more fun to kill than you."  
Noel had thought he couldn’t feel any more frightened.  Now he realized he was wrong. "No," he said. "Cy wouldn't come here.  He hates me." 

"Wrong on both counts," Morgan said.  "He's already coming."

"You can send him away.  I'll stay quiet up here."

Morgan smiled.  "Yes, you will."  He picked up a roll of silvery tape and tore off a strip.  

“You don’t have to kill him.” Noel spoke in a rush, then turned his head to one side. It was in vain.  Morgan pressed a hand over Noel’s mouth, smoothing the tape down over it, but then he didn’t take his hand away.  Instead he leaned closer.  

“Yes, I do,” he hissed.  “He touched you.  Some no-account human put his hands on high-blooded Noel Phoenix, Darius’ only son.”  Morgan’s hand was gripping Noel’s face so tightly that Noel had to steel himself not to flinch.  “He made you dirty with his touch.  He’s going to die for that.”

Then Morgan took a slow breath and the tension went out of his body.   He took his hand away and actually smiled.

“Try to relax,” Morgan said, standing up.  “This will all be over soon.”


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just FYI, this chapter and the next contain more violent content, but in a less disturbing setting and a bit more canon-typical.

Cy wanted a drink.  Badly.  A little something to steady his nerves, but he wasn’t going to do it.  There wasn’t time, and he needed his wits about him.  If he’d ever had wits.

_Think. You were never the best in school, Cy, but you got to think now.  For Noel and you._

Whoever this man was who’d attacked Noel, he was no small-town lawman or skinny, so-called occult expert.  He was Night World all the way.Somewhere along the line, Cy had stopped believing that Noel was an escapee from an asylum, or even that he and his friends were involved in some harmless ‘nature religion.’  He believed in the Night World now.  Part of it, of course, was that he didn’t have any other way to explain his ability to sense when Noel was in terrible trouble.  That had happened twice now.  

The other part of it was the binding spell Noel had put on him.  Of course, Cy hadn’t tried to hurt anyone since he’d last seen Noel, much less kill anyone.  And while he’d been too proud to admit it to Noel, he really had killed only the three people that Noel knew about.  

Like three people wasn’t enough? Maybe the binding spell was a good idea.  Or it would have been, except for one thing:  Noel needed his help.  He was in trouble, the kind of trouble you couldn’t run off with harsh language.  Cy was coming to his rescue with a dead cop’s gun that he probably couldn’t fire and a knife in his boot he probably couldn’t stick into anyone.  This wasn’t a rescue mission, it was a suicide mission.

It didn’t really matter. Cy had to go. 

_Okay, maybe this bad guy ain’t so bad. Maybe it just seems like that cause Noel’s so scared of him. You’re picking up Noel’s feelings, and you know Noel ain’t the toughest guy in the world._

But he should probably stop thinking about it.  If this guy was Night World, then he was maybe a telepath.  But if Cy screened his thoughts well enough, maybe he could sneak up on this guy and —

And what? 

_Maybe ... if he can’t read my mind ... Stop thinking about it, stupid!_

Cy drove like an automaton, not allowing himself to think.  He kept his mind, his blank mind, on Noel’s energy, Noel’s fear, which was calling out loudly to him from somewhere outside the city. But as he drove, he didn’t think about where he was going or what he was going to do when he got there. Instead, he recited things mentally, crowding out thought with trivia.

He recited all the state capitals he knew, then the foreign ones.  The foreign ones didn’t take much time.  

In the countryside now.

Cy did the multiplication tables for while, until he pulled up before an old barn, a semi-famous local landmark, and killed the engine. Going in, he worked on the poem he’d had to memorize in the eighth grade.

 _Nature’s first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold_ ... what came next? ... _bud must yield to leaf, so Eden sank to grief ..._

On the stairs now, climbing.  Knife in the boot, gun in hand.

_So dawn must turn to day ..._

“Nothing gold can stay,” Morgan said silkily.  “Hello, Cy.”

Cy looked past him, to Noel, chained down with his mouth taped.  His eyes looked more sad than scared.  Cy didn’t know what the weirdo chalk circle was about but it didn’t look promising.  He liked the noose hanging from a rafter, above the hayloft trapdoor, even less.

Time for bravado.  Time to pretend.

Cy pointed the gun at Morgan.  “You get one chance and one chance only.  Let him loose and then lie on floor with your hands on your neck and maybe I won’t blow the back of your head off.”

Morgan was afraid of the gun, just a little.  Cy saw it in his eyes and felt a great relief.

“All right,” Morgan said slowly.  He looked around him.  “I’ll give you the key, and you can unlock the manacles.”

Noel shook his head.  _No._

“No,” Cy said.  “You do it.”

Morgan tilted his head slightly.  “You seem rather nervous for someone with a big gun.”

“Quit fucking around.”

Morgan was still looking at him.  “And you don’t want me in your thoughts, do you?  What are you hiding?”

Cy cocked the gun.  

“You can’t fire that weapon, can you?” Morgan laughed.  “You almost had me worried for a minute. “

“Let. Him. Go.”  

Smiling quizzically, Morgan approached Cy.  Cy backed away, but Morgan kept coming until Cy’s shoulder blades touched the wall and the barrel of the gun was pressed up against Morgan’s chest.  

“Do it, Cy,” Morgan urged him.  “Pull the trigger.”

No words could describe how badly Cy wanted to, but his hand wouldn’t cooperate.  It was as if his fingers were solid wood.  

Morgan wrenched the gun away.  Cy let it go and slid to the floor of the loft. Morgan threw the gun away, over the side of the hayloft.  It hit the barn floor and went off with a bang that caused birds outside to take flight; Cy could hear their flapping wings.  He didn’t let himself believe someone would hear the gunshot and investigate.  They were much too far out in the countryside.  

Cy looked up at the noose again and said weakly, “Are you going to hang Noel?”

“No,” Morgan said.  “I’m going to hang you.  Can you stand up and walk to your death like a man?”

Cy got up slowly. Standing, he had a better view of Noel, and he saw something kind of interesting. Noel was trying to scrape his right hand out of the manacle, and he was almost succeeding.

“Come on,” Morgan said, about seven feet from Cy.  But Cy stood transfixed.

Morgan furrowed a brow and turned to see what Cy was staring at.  He turned just in time to see Noel pull one hand loose.

“No!” Morgan yelled.

Noel threw most of his body out of the circle.


	12. Chapter 12

There was a weird sound like a rush of wind as a hot white fire flared all around the circle and then over Noel’s body.  Cy heard Noel scream, first a muffled sound, then loud and clear.  Because his other hand was still chained, Noel’s arm was across the line and the fire kept crackling across it instead of dying out.

Morgan cursed and rushed to Noel’s side.  Inside the circle he unlocked Noel’s hand, and Noel pulled his arm out. The fire died, and Noel lay on his stomach outside the circle.  Only a charred wisp remained of the tape over his mouth; the last fell away as Noel painfully licked his lips and raised his face. He wasn’t looking at Morgan.  He was looking at Cy, his eyes intent, and his voice was clear and strong when he spoke.  

“I release you,” Noel said.

Immediately, Cy’s hand dived toward his boot. Morgan dodged just in time. The knife flashed through the air and stuck not in Morgan’s heart, where Cy had been aiming, but into his shoulder.  Morgan roared with pain.  He fell and rolled — awkwardly, keeping his upper chest and shoulders off the floor — to the edge of the loft, then over.

Cy thought of the gun, thought of jumping down after him, but for the first time he realized the loft smelled of burnt flesh. Morgan was erased from his mind. “Oh, God,” he said, and went to Noel’s side.  

Oh no, it was bad, Cy thought.  He was really burned.  His clothes were burned, shredded as though the flames had been the teeth of an industrial machine, and they were smoldering in places.  His skin was —well, in the least-damaged areas the skin was intact but seared in colorful patterns, red and orange and deep blue.  In other areas, though, the flames had blistered Noel’s flesh, and in yet others the skin had cracked opened and was bleeding. The worst spot by far was the arm that had been over the line for long seconds until Morgan had reached him.  The upper arm  was blackened and stiffened like the limb of a tree that had been through a forest fire. It was, Cy realized, all but charcoal.  

He swallowed hard and thought of something to say. “That was real brave, going over that line like that,” he said.  

Noel tried to sit up.  “My arm,” he said.  But as soon as he tried to pull it to him, Noel yelped in pain.  

“No, no,” Cy said.  “Lie down.  Lie still.”

Noel did, still trying to cradle the wounded limb somehow, but not knowing where to touch it that wouldn’t hurt.

“I got to go call for help,” Cy said.  “You need to go to the hospital.”

“No,” Noel said.  “That won’t help.”

“What will?”  Cy asked.  He thought Noel wanted healers again.

“The gun,” Noel said.  

“What?” Cy thought he had misunderstood.

“Get the gun. Finish it.”  Noel saw Cy’s unwillingness.  “Please. I’m going to die anyway.”

“The hell you are!” In his anger, Cy put his hands on Noel’s shoulders and squeezed.  Noel screamed in agony.

Cy jerked his hands away.  “Oh God,” Cy said, “I’m sorry.”

“Please,” Noel whispered, faintly. “It has to happen. It’s prophecy.”

Cy didn’t want to get the gun; he really didn’t. _You’re selfish,_ he told himself.  _If you could you’d make him live forever, even in terrible pain, rather than lose him._

Noel needed a soulmate’s kind of love now. The kind that sacrificed. Cy bent close, so that his raw-honey hair brushed Noel’s face, a touch soft enough not to hurt.  

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Baby, I’m so sorry.”  As gently as he could, Cy lowered his lips to Noel’s and kissed him.

______

Morgan was pleased to see that some herbs mixed with cobweb stopped the bleeding from his shoulder wound.  It would heal fine. The gun was in his hand; Morgan had taken it from the barn with him.  It would be a useful precaution on his trip back in.  He couldn’t just leave.  He had to be absolutely sure that Noel was dead, and then he was going to carry out his plan for the human, Cy.

To be sure, the boy posed no future threat to Morgan.  With Noel dead, he’d flail around awhile in self-indulgent misery, probably with drugs and alcohol involved, and either kill himself in a mishap or overdose, or live a pathetic meaningless human life.  Surely, he might dream of avenging Noel’s death.  But he’d never be able to find, much less kill,  Lord Morgan of Circle Midnight.

But the boy already had — by a fluke — actually hurt Morgan.  He’d drawn blood, and he’d caused Morgan to behave in an undignified way, if only for a moment.  Morgan scowled to think of himself rolling off the loft like some traveling salesman escaping after being caught screwing a farmer’s daughter.  Oh, the boy was going to hang for that.  

In the loft, the boy was sitting in the corner, cradling Noel in his arms.  He turned to Morgan, looking tired and resigned.

“Get up,” Morgan demanded.  

The boy stood.

“Go stand under the noose.  That’s right.  Put it around your neck.”  Morgan smiled a grim smile.  The boy offered no resistance, doing as he was told.  

Morgan looked back at Noel to see if his eyes were open, if he were watching.  But he was very still.  Even his chest wasn’t rising or falling.  

“Is he dead?” Morgan asked.  

“Does he look like he’s alive?” the kid said.

Morgan glared.  “You don’t deserve a death less painful than his,” he grated. He moved a step closer and spoke more softly.  “This won’t really be that painless.  The rope isn’t long enough to break your neck.  You’re going to strangle.  Slowly.”  He smiled.  “You’re going to kick on the end of that rope with every cell in your brain screaming for oxygen, and I’m going to relish every minute.”

Morgan stepped away and dropped the platform out from under Cy. 

Who failed to fall. 

He was levitating, and the hanging rope was going slack. Morgan’s first thought was that Noel was alive and somehow had cast a spell.  He ran to check for a pulse.

“Oh, don’t worry, your circle did its work,” Cy said.

Morgan turned.  Cy had removed the noose from his neck.  It swung emptily as Cy floated yet higher.

“Who the hell are you?” Morgan almost yelled.

The kid smiled.  “That’s a very perceptive question,” he said. “And it’s funny you should mention hell.”

“Just tell me how you’re — “ Morgan shut his mouth abruptly.  In the middle of his demand for answers, he’d started breathing smoke.  

Cy was watching him, almost with fascination.  Morgan barely noticed.  He was starting to sweat and smoke trickled from his nostrils.  He glanced back at Noel’s body again.  

“I don’t understand!” he cried.  The hairs on his arm were smoldering.  “How —”  the statement ended on a curl of flame from between his lips, burning his face.  “Stop! Make it stop! Have mercy!”

“Like you had mercy on me?”  

Morgan stared. The young human didn’t talk like a hick Louisiana kid, and somehow his eyes looked different.  Wider, deeper and calm, like Noel’s.  And yet that gaze was also pitiless.  Under it, the fine hairs on Morgan’s body burst into little flames. 

“No!”  It came out as a flame worthy of a dragon, and Morgan was burning.  He stumbled and bounced off a wall, waved his arms, and through it all never took his eyes off the young witch-human, now strong as a demigod. Noel was in there somewhere, Noel who couldn’t hurt a fly, who had compassion for everyone.  Noel would take pity on him, if only Morgan could talk to him ... but all he had left were screams.


	13. Chapter 13

It should have frightened Cy when it happened.  Having someone else’s soul come into your body and merge with yours ... it would have sounded terrifying, if anyone had warned him in advance it was going to happen.

But of course neither he nor Noel had known.  Cy had simply lowered his mouth to Noel’s, they had kissed, and then ...  he hadn’t felt invaded.  He’d felt enveloped.  By Noel, his gentleness and warmth soothing the rage and hostility that had always eaten away at Cy.  And Cy wanted to weep at the relief of it, because now he knew he’d never be evil again.    

The first thing Noel felt was relief as he escaped the excruciating pain of his burns into Cy’s body.  Then he realized the relief he felt was more than physical.  He understood at last how lonely he’d been all his life, never admitting it. Until now.  Now Noel knew he’d never be lonely again.  

And then he felt Cy’s strength, his fearlessness and willingness to fight, filling in the weak and insecure parts of his personality.  And as that happened, he felt something stir inside him.  The family gifts, the ones he’d been so afraid of he’d locked them in a kind of mental deep freeze and convinced himself he didn’t have the key.  

In that old barn, someone new had been born.

______

Gravel crunched and sprayed as Keller brought the car to a skidding halt.  “Stay here!” both she and Nissa yelled to Thea as they leapt out, closely followed by Winnie.    
The three pounded across the barnyard and inside, as Thea watched from where she stood, just outside the car.  She waited as a breeze ruffled the treetops and a bird’s shadow flashed against the moon. A crow. Hadn’t she seen one like that in Sunrise Key?

Still there was no sound.  Thea’s curiosity was too great, and she walked swiftly toward the hulking shadow across the yard.  

Inside, in the semidark, she heard a muffled weeping.  One of Keller’s team? Weeping?  Thea ran the last few steps and climbed into the loft.  “It’s just me,” she said, in order not to startle them.

No one reproached her for disobeying Keller when she appeared.  Not even Keller herself.  She stood with Nissa near a terribly burned body.  Thea saw that whoever it was had been tall and slender and — she didn’t know how she knew this — male.  There was an amulet around the neck, faintly smudged with ash.  It was lodestone.  

It was Winnie who she’d heard crying; the girl was down on her knees next to a another body whose clothes were in rags and whose skin was blistered, charred and bloody. This body was also burned, but not beyond recognition, and a cold horror rolled down Thea’s spine.  This was Noel. 

“Is he dead?” she whispered. 

Nissa nodded.  Her face was grim, although she wasn’t crying.   

Neither was Keller, but she looked worse than either of her two Daybreak agents.   Her eyes were faraway and her face was fast losing color.  She was in shock. Thea understood.  Keller’s whole life was Daybreak, her work staving off the end of the  world. Now Noel was dead.  The end of the world would happen.  

_Oh Goddess,_ Thea thought.  It would happen.  It would happen.

There was a fluttering of wings.  A bird was in the barn with them, fluttering up through the rafters.  Even Keller broke out of her trance a little to watch as it swooped over their heads, dangerously close to their hair, and finally landed on the straw.

It was the same bird she’d seen flying outside, Thea realized.  Just after it landed, the crow’s black form bloomed upwards, the lines of its body blurring and reshaping into that of a young woman with glossy black hair.  

Of course, Thea thought, a rogue shapeshifter.  A Night World spy.  Thea felt a moment’s apprehension, but it was four against one.  There was nothing to fear, unless reinforcements were close behind.  

The girl looked around, taking in the circle, Noel’s burned form and Winnie’s tears.  Then a smile spread across her face.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” she said. “The Wild Power is dead?”

Winnie’s tears, Nissa’s cold gaze, Keller’s chalky face gave her all the answer she needed.    

“He’s dead!” The shapeshifter’s smile grew even wider and her eyes glittered.  “Four less one!”  she cried, loud enough to be heard a quarter-mile away.  As the stunned Daybreakers watched, she broke into a sort of dance.  “Four less one and darkness triumphs! Four less one and darkness triumphs! Darkness triumphs! Darkness triumphs!” 

“Shut up!”  Winnie hurled witchfire across the loft at her.  She missed, blinded by tears.  The light hit the wall and sizzled, disappeared.  

The girl shook her black hair and laughed.  Then she caught sight of the other body, tall and savagely burned.   

“Lord Morgan,” she whispered.  She crossed the loft to stand over the fallen form.  “You have paid the ultimate price for this victory.  Your name will be legend. Legend.”  She bent and removed the lodestone necklace.  “This will be a relic of great power.”

The Daybreakers just watched her.  Even Winnie did nothing. They all realized that further fighting was useless.  Nor would the crow girl attack them; there was no reason.  Not anymore.  Circle Daybreak was as good as crushed.

“You’ll excuse me if I don’t stay,” said the girl.  “I have good news to spread.”  She shifted back into the crow, the amulet clutched between its claws, and lighted on the windowsill.  There the crow cawed again, another version of the victory cry the girl had made. But its celebration was cut short.  A stone flew out of nowhere, striking the bird on its chest.  With an awkward squeak, the crow dropped the amulet, flapped its wings, and flew away.

Thea looked in the direction the stone had flown from.  In the rafters was a pair of long legs, and then a lanky blond boy jumped down.  

“Thea,” he said, as if he knew her. He had a warm, honeyed voice, and his gray-blue eyes were trained seriously on her.  “I’m, uh, Cy,” he said.  “I was with Noel a lot in the past few days.” 

“You were his soulmate,” Thea said, understanding dawning. 

“Yes,” he said.  

Thea looked down at Noel’s body.  Since she’d learned he was dead, she’d only been thinking of the loss of the Fourth Wild Power.  Now she saw Noel, who’d only wanted to be left alone, who’d never wanted power or fame, who’d found his soulmate only days before he died.  Tears welled in her eyes. 

“Don’t,” the boy urged.  

“We said we’d protect him,” Thea said, weeping now.  “I said it myself.  And we failed him.  We let him die.”   

She felt the boy’s hands on her shoulders.  “Daughter of Hellewise, do not cry.”

Thea looked up, her mouth dropping slightly in surprise.  It was as if Noel himself had spoken to her.  “Did Noel tell you that name?”

“No, not exactly,” Cy said.  “We should talk somewhere else.  Can I come back with you?”

“We have to make arrangements for the body,” Nissa said.

“We can just call the cops and leave it here,” Cy said.

Winnie looked up. “No, we can not,” she said fiercely. 

Cy blinked.  “I meant ... it’s just an empty shell.  Noel doesn’t care.”

“How do you know?” Winnie demanded, while Thea thought, _Doesn’t?_

“I know,” Cy told Winnie.  Looking around at their unconvinced expressions, Cy said, “Look, we’ve really got to talk.”  
  



	14. Chapter 14

Night was falling on the coast of Oregon, where the principal members of Daybreak were gathered.  Electric light glowed from the highest window, where Thierry and Hannah were sharing a guest room. They were expected downstairs momentarily, but Thierry was still sitting on the windowsill, staring out at the rolling landscape and the ocean in the distance.

“I won’t believe it until I see it for myself,” he said to Hannah.  

There were dark rings under his eyes.  Keller had reported the death of Noel Phoenix to him, of course, and the news had quite naturally hit him hard. Then she’d called back two hours later, with an incredible story.

The human that Noel had called his soulmate, Cyrus Mansfield, had accompanied the Daybreak strike team back to the safe house in New Orleans. 

Once there, he had asked for assurances that the house was free from any possible Night World surveillance.  Almost offended, Shadrach Abforth, who ran the safe house, told him emphatically that it was.  

Then the human had told them something extraordinary. He explained he wasn’t really Cy Mansfield anymore, but Cy and Noel both.  As in the legends of old, their souls had merged again in one body, with a kiss, before Noel had died.

“Those are just stories,” Thierry had said, tersely.

“He set the contents of a trash can on fire with his mind,” Keller said.  “Shadrach had to get the extinguisher. We all saw it.”

After a moment of silence, Thierry had said, “Bring him to the house in Oregon.  We’ll meet you there.”  

But now, Thierry was putting off the meeting.  “Fire is one thing, but blue fire is something else,” he told Hannah.  “What if the power died with Noel’s physical form?”

“Why would it?” she asked.

“Think of the prophecy: ‘fire in their blood.’  Noel’s soul may be in this boy’s body, but not his blood.”

“Maybe,” Hannah said.  “Then again, ‘in their blood’ might just refer to the way blood was to flow before they can use their power.”

“I hope you’re right, love.  No, actually, I take that back.  I haven’t let myself hope,” Thierry said.  “I don’t want to go downstairs, for fear of confirming the worst.”

“I’ve never known you to hide from anything,” Hannah said.  

Thierry smiled at her as best he could.  “Then I won’t start now.”  

They walked down the old oak staircase to the second floor, and out onto the deck.  The gibbous moon was rising in the east, providing light, and instead of a floodlight there were two torches, flaming brightly, at the west and north edges of the deck railing. 

Assembled outside, talking nervously, were Keller and her team, Thea, and the three Wild Powers and their soulmates.  And, standing at the railing, his back to Thierry, was a tall stranger with dark-blonde hair, in faded jeans and a flannel shirt.  

“There’s only one person that could be,” Thierry murmured to Hannah.

“Or two people, actually,” she whispered back, and Thierry found himself smiling.  

At their approach, the conversations came to a stop, and the Daybreakers turned to acknowledge them.  The boy at the railing turned as well.  

“Are you Thierry?”  he asked, his gray eyes assessing them coolly.

Thierry nodded.  

“I’m sorry I lost my temper on the phone,” he said.  

Thierry felt a leap of surprise at the reference to the angry conversation he’d had with Noel Phoenix the day Noel had died.  

“And you must be Hannah,” the boy said, nodding to her.

Hannah nodded in acknowledgement. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she said.  “Did you light those for us?” she asked, gesturing toward the torches.  The boy grinned, and Thierry knew his soulmate had just made a friend.  

“No,” the boy said.  “But I think it’s time we found out if I’m the fourth flamethrower-from-hell you’ve all been looking for.”  

Several pairs of eyes darted toward the scarecrow-like figure that had been set up for the test.  Thierry opened his mouth to speak, but just then the sliding-glass door opened again.  

They all turned, and Aradia emerged in a long white dress.  Nobody spoke as she emerged and stood for a moment, her face turning slightly as though looking for someone. Then, unerring, she came to stand in front of the newcomer.  They were silent a moment, face to face.

Then she smiled, a sight to melt stone, and put her arms around the newcomer.  “Welcome, Cy, and welcome home, Noel.”

The tall blond boy returned her embrace.  “Thank you, my lady,” he said. “It would be a honor if you would draw the blood.”  

“I will,” Aradia said.  

“Wait!”  Thea said.  She held up a shiny object. “I brought this along ... something to give you incentive.”  

She ran down the steps and put Lord Morgan’s shiny lodestone amulet around the neck of the straw man.  Thierry saw her smiling as she did so, and knew that Thea believed this boy could produce the blue fire.

Aradia’s hand was steady as she made a small cut on the boy’s arm; he did not wince.  He turned to face the straw man.  Everyone fell silent.

Thierry watched the stranger, not the statue, for what seemed a very long time.

What if Cy/Noel couldn’t call down the blue fire?  How would they proceed? Could they know for sure whether it was because he wasn’t really the Fourth?  Or because the power had died with Noel’s physical body?  Or that he was the Fourth, but he simply didn’t have enough ‘incentive’ yet to produce the fire, as Thea had suggested?  How else could they test him, and how long could they wait for the newly confident Night World moved to crush Daybreak like —

Blue lightning struck from a cloudless sky, loud enough to make everyone assembled  flinch.  The scarecrow seemed to explode, and the lodestone amulet flew toward the deck, so that Winnie had to duck.  A whiptail of blue fire ran in a circle around the remains of the scarecrow, sizzling, and died.  

“Whoa,” the boy said, and Thierry heard the pronounced Louisiana accent that had to be Cy’s, just as a moment earlier, talking to Aradia, the stranger had sounded like Noel.  

Bits of flaming straw lay on the grass and on the deck.  Nissa was studying them.  Morgead was looking at the remains of the scarecrow, and nearly everyone else was looking at the tall blond boy.  No one quite knew what to say.

Then Jez stepped forward, red hair shining in the firelight, and clasped the boy’s hand in hers. It was a gesture of welcome, an acknowledgment of his power, and acceptance into the most important secret society in the world. Delos followed suit, putting his hand on theirs, and Iliana came next and did the same.  The Four were together.

A sound broke the silence.  It was Keller.  She was weeping.

Winnie and Nissa looked at their streetwise leader crying like a child, and suddenly Winnie’s eyes were full and Nissa made a hoarse sound like a cough.  Maggie’s eyes shone, and a tear spilled down her cheek.  Thea looked radiantly happy in her tears.     

An unspeakable joy ran through Circle Daybreak like an electric current, and it could only be expressed in tears.  No one was immune, and no one was ashamed.  Galen held Keller close, and Hannah leaned against Thierry.  Winnie slipped over to embrace Aradia.  

And then someone began to laugh.  This time, Thierry couldn’t even see who it was. But someone else followed suit, and Morgead gave voice to the realization that was dawning on all of them. “Oh, they are so dead, “ he said.  “They’re never going to see it coming.”  Then they were all laughing, switching from tears as easily as children.    Because it was true.

The Night World believed the Fourth was dead.  And Daybreak would do nothing to convince them otherwise. Noel Phoenix’s body had been flown from Louisiana, and Daybreak would give him the most high-profile of memorials. Aradia would officiate, in honor of Noel’s sacrifice.  Many witches would be invited to attend, and they would mourn publicly at the flaming bier of the Phoenix heir.  Oh, it would be a very good show, Thierry thought.

And Cy Mansfield would be taken into Circle Daybreak out of pity, one of those humans who drift into Daybreak after a loved one is killed by the Night World. To the eyes of outsiders, he’d be a no-account foot soldier. And if he sometimes said, _Oh God_ and other times, _Oh Goddess_ , well, that'd be a small quirk; no one but Daybreak would understand the significance. 

As the Daybreakers broke up into knots, discussing battle plans and their revived hopes for the future, Thierry went to the side of the Fourth.  He clasped Noel’s arm in the old fashion.  Or Cy’s arm, he thought.  “Welcome, brother,” he said, avoiding the name confusion.  Then he shook his head.  “I’m still not sure how all this happened.”

“It was prophecy,” the boy said.  “Noel Phoenix was supposed to die before 21, and he did.”

“I know,” Thierry said.  “It’s the other prophecy I don’t understand.”

“I do. Cy Mansfield came from a troubled family.  He was prone to violence.  In fact, I killed three people before I met Noel.”  

Thierry nodded, although the boy’s jumping around in pronouns was a little hard to follow.  

The boy continued,“You know what Cy told me in Florida?  ‘I don’t just have a dark side.  Maybe I’m all dark.’”  He smiled. “Do you see it?”

At last, Thierry did understand.  “One from the Twilight —”

“— to be one with the dark.  Prophecies always come true.”

“Otherwise they wouldn’t be prophecies,” Thierry finished.  “You understand for security reasons, you can never be called Noel, but Cy instead?” Then he corrected himself, “Of course, I’m not saying that one name is more right than the other ... I just mean — ”

“It’s okay,”  his new friend said. “Names are irrelevant.  I know who I am.”

And for the first time in his life, he did.


End file.
